Suchergebnisse

Thanks to Ron Schmidt for this image In John Maynard Keynes essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" one can find the following formulation of the cultural transformation of post-capitalism:"I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and
traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love
of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who
take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the
good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day
virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things,
the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. For a least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."Keynes formulation of course draws from a long history of the virtues of vices stretching back to Mandeville and Smith, in which it is vice not virtue, selfishness not selflessness, that drives social change and progress. Where of course he differs from both is in seeing this as an unfortunate state of affairs, a necessary evil, and a temporary one. Keynes prediction has proven to not come true, not for the grandchildren of his era at least, and we are no closer to his cultural revolution than we are in the fifteen hour work week he envisioned.I would like to even go a step further and suggest that not only has Keynes prediction not come true, that the foul gods of avarice and usury not only continue to reign, but also that they have deposed any other rival ideals. In order to understand how this is true, it is necessary to extract a descriptive dimension to Keynes' pronouncement. We can argue that much of the twentieth century, at least in capitalist countries, there was something of a split between two cultures, one that could claim the name culture in the pursuit of art, literature, and philosophy, and the other dedicated to profit. The divide between these two can be seen in multiple places. In the university for one in which the real divide is not between science and the arts, but between the majors that have an immediate practical and profitable application and those that will always elicit the question, "what are you going to do with that?" This includes the sciences especially in their more research oriented and fundamental dimension, biology, physics, astronomy, zoology, etc., The divide can also be seen in popular culture, especially in film, which oriented around a calendar divided between blockbusters and prestige films, between films that make money and films that win awards. This divide between doing good for oneself, in the financial sense, and being good, divided knowledge and culture, imposing, as Marx put it, two separate yardsticks, two measurements. To go back to the college example, the person who pursued the ideals of "truth and beauty," to put it in the classic sense, would always have to answer the question of how they were going to make a living, and the person who pursued making a living might, upon reflection, have a nagging sense that they are missing out on something more. If this example does not hold up then think about the world of movies, split between the person who enjoys blockbusters and the person who enjoys not only prestige films, does anyone really like blatant Oscar bait, but what we used to call "art films," the category encompassing foreign and independent movies. This is also a split between two different yardsticks, two different measurements, one is assessed in terms of profit and the other in terms of some artistic merit. (If one wanted to put this in more sophisticated terms, those of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that it is a matter of axioms and codes, but I will leave that aside for now)Contradictions have a way of resolving themselves and one of these two standards had to give (a very un-Deleuzian point, I know). What we have seen, contra Keynes, is not the return of the lilies of the field but the mowing down of everything in terms of profit. The rise of the Marvel movie is not just the dominance of a new genre, that of superhero films, but of a new standard in which box office is the only tool of evaluation. I remember reading somewhere that Disney was at one point unique among film studios in that it did not have a prestige division, a Sony Searchlight or whatever. Why bother releasing prestige films in December to possibly get an award that no one cares about when you could make more money releasing a new Spider-Man or Star Wars movie? I also think that the current conflict over the university is one of the revenge of the business majors against the rest. It is an attempt to impose one standard on the university, that which makes a profit, removing anything that would be concerned with anything else. It is hard to finish this line of thought without mentioning Trump, who stands out among Presidents in his absolute disinterest in anything resembling art or truth. Part of Trump's appeal to his voters is in his constantly saying again and again, who cares about art? who cares about literature? just stupid, and un-American nerds, as the following clip makes clear. (Oh, and for the record, I doubt he has seen Gone With the Wind, but he knows enough to know that it has the right nostalgia, and the right racial politics to appeal to his audience)Trump does very well among a particular class of capitalists, what some call lumpen capitalists, the small business owners, franchise owners, and, more significantly, entire fringe industries that border on scams. With respect to the latter, I just finished reading this book, Get Rich or Lie Trying, and the chapter on Trump University was truly shocking. I knew it was an multilevel marketing company, but I did not expect it to be such a transparent scheme. Ultimately, this might bring us to an economic explanation of this particular cultural revolution, what has made the business class more brazen and more transparent. I think we have to see this as a particular kind of class composition, not, as in the classic version aimed at the working class, at understanding its technical and political composition, but at the ruling class, or at least a segment of it. (Our current cultural battles over DEI and the like are really conflicts within the ruling class, between those companies that need to expand their customer and employee base, and thus their interest in diversity and those that see all such things as challenges to their regional control and fiefdoms.) A full analysis of the intersection of economy and culture in this transformation is more than I have space for, it seems enough now to say that we are in the grips of a different cultural revolution than the one Keynes predicted, and our lives, and those of our grandchildren, are possibly all the worse for it.

El conflicto social ha sido uno de los grandes temas de las ciencias sociales, principalmente a partir de la modernidad, periodo en que ontológica, normativa y epistemológicamente, se comenzaron a configurar diversos debates y estudios orientados a comprender el orden sociopolítico, su estabilidad y sus posibilidades de transformación o ruptura.
Durante el siglo XIX y principalmente en el siglo XX, crisis económicas, guerras, procesos de liberación nacional, insurrecciones, alzamientos populares y movimientos sociales fueron parte del marco histórico que propició el surgimiento de distintas escuelas y teorías sobre conflicto y acción colectiva, dando origen a numerosos objetos de estudio.
Por un lado, destacan quienes desde la tradición marxista se centraron en explicar las causas estructurales del conflicto y cómo la expansión del capitalismo, su modo de producción y la estructura de clases provocan una grieta central y permanente en las sociedades. De ahí en más los aportes marxianos, de la sociología francesa o de las escuelas Frankfurtianas han sido dominantes en este campo, dando origen a largos debates en economía política sobre el capitalismo, neoliberalismo, sociedad posindustrial, entre otros elementos que proveen de un marco interpretativo global para el conflicto.
Por otro lado, desde la tradición estructural funcionalista autores como Parson, Smelser, Olson, Dahrendorf o Coser -con distintos énfasis- centraron su agenda investigativa en el proceso político y la relación entre actores -que padecen agravios y se movilizan- e institucionalidad política, que procesa a través de distintos mecanismos el descontento y malestar, teniendo como centralidad la función que cumple el conflicto para la reproducción del orden sociopolítico. Desde este inicio, diversos teóricos han estudiado la relación acción, orden sociopolítico y efectos. A través de escuelas como la movilización de recursos o los enfoques de la contienda política, se ha indagado en repertorios, organización, marcos y estructura de oportunidades, o investigado aspectos como la cooptación, transformación, impacto, ajustes, funcionamiento democrático y gobernabilidad.
Finalmente, otras líneas diversas como las tradiciones del marxismo culturalista, el posmarxismo, las teorías de la identidad, el subjetivismo o el pragmatismo, centraron sus estudios en los procesos de subjetivación macro (sociocultural) o micro (psicosocial) investigando, entre otras cosas, en el tránsito entre individuo y colectividad, entre colectividad e identidad, y entre estas dos últimas y la acción colectiva enfatizado en gramáticas, performances, emociones y sentimientos como clave explicativa del proceso de subjetivación y, por extensión, de la acción. Sin ser injustos en omisiones en esta breve introducción, tanto estructura, actores, mediaciones, discursos, impactos, repertorios y subjetivación, han sido algunos de los diversos objetos de estudio durante el siglo XX orientados a dilucidar en las dinámicas de conflicto y la acción colectiva.
Por otro lado, tal como ocurrió a inicios del XX en un marco de crisis, revoluciones y movimiento obrero; o en la década de los 70´ con crisis, revueltas y nuevos movimientos sociales; en la actualidad nos encontramos nuevamente en un escenario global de alta conflictividad. Nuevos antagonismos políticos, crisis económica y ambiental, procesos migratorios, entre otros fenómenos, han abierto procesos de movilización social, indignación y protestas que han reposicionado en las ciencias sociales nuevos y viejos debates.
El presente Dossier, denominado conflicto, subjetivación y acción política, está compuesto por seis artículos que entregan distintos aportes y visiones, dando cuenta de varias de las tradiciones teóricas descritas anteriormente.
En esta línea, Andrés Cabrera siguiendo una visión estructural, busca explicar cómo la masificación de mercancías digitales y el ciberespacio han provocado la mercantilización digital de la vida cotidiana, elemento que ha tendido a generar la dislocación de lo social potenciando la desestabilización de los sistemas políticos. Para Cabrera, la producción y consumo de mercancías digitales ha aumentado la complejidad social de conexiones, impactado en el plano "subjetivo, sensitivo y corporal", en donde el "presentismo" y la inmediatez temporal han dificultado la capacidad política para dar respuesta a demandas sociales, limitando las identidades y coartando la posibilidad de proyección estratégica. Con ello, en un escenario crisis de la política en occidente, la opinión pública se ha vuelto más compleja, haciendo de la política una "mera respuesta contingente" profundizando con ello la crisis política. A su vez, estás dinámicas provocadas por la expansión estructural del capitalismo en distintas áreas de la vida -permitidas por el desarrollo tecnológico- implicarían transformaciones en las dinámicas del conflicto social, favoreciendo que las formas de protesta y acción colectiva sean fugaces y dispersas.
Por otra parte, el artículo de Carolina Shillagi, se centra en explicar cómo el fenómeno de las víctimas -en sus diversas expresiones-, se ha transformado en un nuevo proceso de subjetivación para la acción política y social en el mundo contemporáneo. De este modo, la autora, centrada en un estudio aplicado en Argentina, enfatiza en los actores sociales que accionan el espacio público a partir de su reconocimiento como víctimas En este marco, gran parte del conflicto social desarrollado por una pluralidad de actores, radica discursivamente en disputar qué se entiende por víctima, quiénes son considerados como tal y cuáles son los alcances de la reparación o el accionar del Estado. Es por esta razón que este tipo de acción centrada en el fenómeno de "víctima " reconfiguraría la relación Estado - sociedad por medio de la mediación de dispositivos estatales y agentes que modificarían las formas de gobernar.
Violeta Montero por su parte, hace un estudio aplicado al movimiento estudiantil universitario chileno de 2011, siguiendo las agendas investigativas de las escuelas sociopolíticas que buscan indagar el impacto de los conflictos en el campo político institucional. De este modo, Montero se centra en el estudio combinado entre acción y consecuencias políticas, con la finalidad de dilucidar tanto las estrategias de los actores, como las repercusiones directas e indirectas en las decisiones político-institucionales. En su estudio describe el proceso de incorporación al gobierno de Michelle Bachelet de dirigentes estudiantiles, los cambios en la agenda y discursos, la presencia de la temática en los programas presidenciales, entre otros elementos.
Interesante es el contrapunto que se puede realizar entre la investigación aplicada de Montero y su propuesta decisión epistemológica, con el artículo de Mariano Millán, quien desarrolla una exhaustiva revisión sobre las bases teóricas del estructural funcionalismo. Millán, centra su artículo en develar las bases analíticas de Coser y Dahrendorf, dos de los clásicos de la teoría de conflicto social. Indagando en conceptos como fluidez, flexibilidad, institucionalización, reforma y asincronía, el autor establece que en la teoría clásica, el conflicto -que funciona como alerta y síntoma- cumple la función de mantener y reproducir el orden, siendo una fuerza creadora dentro de ciertos límites y condiciones como la fluidez de las demandas sociales, la flexibilidad de las estructuras, la canalización institucional y las posibilidades de reforma. De esta forma, el Millán argumenta que los fundamentos normativos de la teoría clásica de conflicto tienen como pilares el liberalismo y el capitalismo, identificando a su vez, cómo este enfoque analítico o algunas de sus bases fundamentales influyó en diversas corrientes de pensamiento y autores como Crozier, Touraine, Elías, Wood, entre otros.
Desde enfoques centrados en la subjetivación y las tradiciones culturalistas, el dossier cierra con los artículos de Enzo Isola, sobre pobladores en Chile, y los autores Juan Pablo Paredes, Nicolás Ortíz y Camila Araya, enfocados en el movimiento estudiantil chileno.
Enzo Izola, presenta un artículo teórico sobre las condiciones que posibilitan el proceso de subjetivación en pobladores a través de las protestas por derechos urbanos. En este plano, si bien los aportes de Izola se centran en Chile, su artículo presenta una discusión teórica que supera a la realidad nacional, cuestionando las teorías clásicas latinoamericanas de la marginalidad. Para el autor, la vida digna operaría como "horizonte ético-político" que posibilitaría la subjetivación política permitiendo la vinculación entre la afección de causas y problemas (sufrimiento) con la dependencia y la vulnerabilidad que constituiría el vínculo de lo colectivo, dando paso con ello al desarrollo de experiencias y objetivos de la acción. En definitiva, el autor reflexiona, a través de distintos aportes teóricos, en el tránsito entre experiencias de sufrimiento y la acción colectiva (subjetivación).
Finalmente, el texto de Paredes, Ortíz y Araya, se enfocan en describir el proceso perfomático del movimiento estudiantil 2011, elemento que marcaría una inflexión en la transición neoliberal chilena y su naturalización en los discursos políticos. Para los autores, la performatividad representa un proceso de subjetivación anclado en una historicidad y el rescate de la memoria por un lado, y en nuevos procesos de socialización y cultura militante por el otro. Los autores, rescatando las tradiciones de Foucault, Deleuze y Ranciere, realizan un interesante discusión sobre el proceso de subjetivación; a su vez, incorporando elementos de autores como Filleule y Tartakowsky describen lo nuevo en los procesos performáticos de la acción colectiva en las marchas y jornadas de protestas, identificando cómo este elemento emocional - simbólico generaría la construcción de cuerpos colectivos. Finalmente, a partir de un trabajo de campo, los autores incorporan relatos de jóvenes militantes de organizaciones político-sociales indagando en cómo a partir de la memoria y la performance, se constituiría una posmemoria.

Halloween in Houston The Following is a response to Vardoulakis book Spinoza, The Epicurean that I gave at SPEP. I previously blogged about the book. One of the many merits of Dimitris Vardoulakis' Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism is that it focuses on the question of obedience as central to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Obedience is what differentiates revelation from knowledge, scripture from philosophy, action from belief. On one side, the first of these terms, there is obedience, that which falls under the control the state, and on the other freedom, the domain of philosophy. However, such an assertion would suggest obedience is a simple matter, that the line between obedience and freedom can be sharply drawn. Vardoulakis suggests that obedience must be understood through a dialectic of authority and freedom. As Vardoulakis describes this dialectic: Authority requires obedience whereas the drive to calculate our utility presupposes that we make our own practical judgements. Thus, under certain conditions, when authority takes over and suspends our judgements the result is political submission. But, also, under different conditions, we may calculate that it is to our utility to let someone else—for instance, someone with more knowledge or expertise—calculate our utility on our behalf. We can show the same interdependence by starting with utility: it is impossible to conceive of the human in terms of the calculation of utility without admitting that obedience, and hence authority, are necessary in certain circumstances. There is no such a thing as pure reason in human action. There is no human immune to obedience. Vardoulakis formulation is striking in two parts, first, as I have already indicated, in suggesting that the division between obedience and freedom, authority and utility, is not easy to draw, as one necessarily spills over into the other, but more importantly in suggesting that this relation is necessarily dialectical. This is the second major contribution of Vardoulakis' book, in arguing not for a dialectic reading of Spinoza but for a specifically Spinozist dialectic.  The idea of a dialectic in Spinoza is a necessarily vexed one. Much of the current turn to Spinoza in contemporary thought, especially that of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri, have promoted Spinoza as an alternative to the dialectic. It is a matter of deciding between affirmation and negation, Spinoza and Hegel. However, Pierre Macherey in the closing of Hegel or Spinoza, puts forward the notion that Spinoza offers a non-teleological dialectic. As Macherey writes, outlining the fundamental problems of this dialectic, What is or what would be a dialectic that functioned in the absence of all guarantees, in an absolutely causal manner, without a prior orientation that would establish within it, from beginning, the principle of absolute negativity, without the promise that all the contradictions in which it engages are by rights resolved, because they carry within them the conditions of their resolution?  The contemporary turn to Spinoza is itself split, without a necessary conditions of a guarantee, between those who see Spinoza as opposed to the dialectic, to negativity and contradiction, and those that see in Spinoza not the nondialectical other of the dialectic, but its dialectical correction, a surprising one since, as Macherey argues, in this case the correction comes before the deviation, Spinoza before Hegel. Spinoza makes possible a dialectic without telos or resolution, a materialist dialectic. Vardoulakis' declaration of the dialectic of authority and utility is most productively read against the backdrop of this turn to a Spinozist dialectic, or a dialectic in Spinoza, which is to say along with Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar as his central interlocutors. (I say Balibar and Macherey, but for the purpose of this response I am going to focus on the former, but Macherey's Sagesse ou Ignorance would seem to have its own dialectic of obedience). As I will argue, in each case what is examined dialectically is obedience itself, or, what we could call, following contemporary philosophy, subjection. That subjection is dialectical can be glimpsed from Spinoza's well known formulation that the masses fight for "servitude as if it was salvation," the formulation suggests that subjection must be thought not just as something passively endured but something actively strived for, we need to see subjection in activity and activity in subjection.  In this way a dialectical reading overcomes the limitations of those interpretations which have apparently found in Spinoza only a theory of subjection, of ideology, or of subversion, of affirmative transformation.. The most obvious of the former would be Louis Althusser, for whom the Spinozist theory of the imagination, with its focus on the subject, is the basis of ideological interpellation. It also overcomes the limitations of those, such as Deleuze and Negri, who find in Spinoza the affirmation of a constitutive and transformative power. Reading Spinoza dialectically means recognize that the very terms of opposition, subjection and constitution, negation and affirmation, must be thought of as thoroughly intertwined. Spinoza is neither a thinker of pure subjection, of the imagination, or first kind of knowledge as ideology, but nor is he the thinker of constituent power or affirmative lines of flight. He is neither of these things, or perhaps both of these things, because subjection and its opposite, lines of flight or constitutive power, are neither of these things. We are always dealing with both, and with both intertwined, that is part of what it means to read Spinoza dialectically.  What do we mean by dialectic? In some sense a definition of the dialectic would seem to be, well undialectical, but beyond such an objection, which is both always tempting and always disappointing, I think that we can offer a basic formulation of at least a few common aspects. First, such a dialectic involves both a unity and a contradiction of opposites, but one without a third term or necessary resolution. Authority and Utility do not resolve themselves into some sublation through the authority of utility itself in a kind of enlightened democracy. However, this does not mean that such a dialectic is entirely static. The rejection of a general resolution, of a third term, means that the resolution of these tensions can only be thought in their historical specificity. Spinoza's historical study of Moses is not an illustration of a general principle but specific instances of what in a concrete situation, a political dialectic. As Balibar argues, "Spinoza's definition can be considered dialectical in the sense that the passage from the abstract to the concrete, as the development of the initial formula's contradictions, arises from a historical study." Spinoza's engagement with the singular case in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is necessary because the contradictions of utility and authority only resolve themselves in a specific situation.  The existing historical situation is not just a contradictory unity of authority and utility, but also reason and imagination. Etienne Balibar has made this particular dialectic central to his understanding of Spinoza. Spinoza reflects on the intersections of imagination and reason, affect and intellect, in the constitution of the collective and the individual in at least two places. The first is in terms of the general definition of ambition. Ambition is the affective constitution of society, the desire that others love what I love, that others live according to my temperament [ingenium]. As such it is inseparable from the imagination, from the imaginary constitution of the other's desire and love. In and through ambition we constitute the image of the other, of 'men' [homines] in general, the generic image of others that functions as a guide for our actions and desires (EIIIP29). It is no longer the love or hatred of this or that individual, or collection of individuals that orients an individual's actions, but a generic idea, a kind of 'society effect.' There are two limits to this affective constitution of ambition. First, at the level of sociality, and the conceptual grasp of social relations, 'men' is a universal. For Spinoza all universals stem from the human body's finitude, it is affected by so many images that it can no longer grasp the singular differences (EIIP40S). What is left then is a generic idea that is produced by the inability to imagine all the myriad things, a universal that is always tainted by some particular content: some will imagine man as a rational animal, while others will think of a featherless biped. The 'men' who we strive to act like, whose image governs our loves and hates, is a fiction, an unstable universal that is imagined differently by different individuals. It is as much a condition of discord as harmony. Second, there is a problem at the level of the object of this sociality, that which we want others to love or hate. We desire that others love what we love, the love (or hatred) we feel is strengthened by the idea that others love what we love. This ambition becomes a source of conflict especially if the object that we desire is subject to the rule of scarcity, and thus cannot be possessed by all equally. Ambition is thus internally conflicted. As Spinoza writes, 'those who love are not of one mind in their love—while they rejoice to sing the praises of the thing they love, they fear to be believed' (EIVP37S1). The constitution of society through ambition is inherently contradictory, the very things that draw people together, the desire to love as others love and to have others love what I love, divide them as well. As conflicted as this sociality is, it is a sociality, which is to say that the ambivalence of ambition are not a remnant of the state of nature, but are a product of sociality itself.  Society, or, as Spinoza puts it, the city, is not exclusively founded on the ambivalent sociality of the passions. It is also founded on reason, on the powers of the intellect. It is the same conatus, the same striving, underlying reason and ambition. In each case there is a striving to make the temperament of the individual coincide with others, to constitute a collective temperament that would reflect the individual. However, the essential difference is in how this relation to the other and the object is constituted. The rational constitution of the state is based on the recognition that it is more useful to live with others. This idea of man is not the idea of men constituted through the imagination, it is not the universal idea, but the utility of sociality relations. It is not the desire that others live as I live, or that I coordinate my love and hates with others, but mankind can accomplish more collectively than individually (EIVP35S). As Spinoza famously writes, 'nothing is more useful to man than man' (EIVP37S2). This idea of man does not produce the ambivalence that determines the affect of ambition. Individuals guided by reason actually agree with each other, add and assist each other, rather than strive to orient their actions around an impossible object of what the others want. Moreover, reason as an object of desire is truly common, not only can it be shared by all, but its worth increases with the number of people who participate in it (EIVP36). Reason is not scarce, not finite, and is actually increased by others thinking the same thing. Men under the guidance of reason can overcome the contradictions of ambition and actually desire that others desire what they desire.  These two different foundations of the city, these two different genesis of sociality, one based on the affect of ambition and the other based on reason, are not two different options: there is not a city of affects and a city of reason supplanting each other as two different phases, two different orders. Spinoza's text presents them as two different demonstrations of the same thing, suggesting the coexistence of these two different constitutions of society. As Balibar writes, 'Sociability is therefore the unity of a real agreement and an imaginary ambivalence, both of which have real effects.' We are always dealing with both affects, with ambition, and reason, with a city founded on a projection of our ideas of man, and a city founded on our rational utility. While there is no telos, no necessary progression by which the city founded on reason, a democracy, necessarily displaces a city founded on founded on superstition and affects, that does no meant that the relation is entirely static. The particular combination of reason and affects defines the nature of a given city, and its particular history. There is no more one generic essence of the city's striving than there is an essence of man's singular striving. The striving, the particular relations that constitute the city, the collective, must be thought from the singular case, from the specific way it is affected and determined. There is thus a history, but this history must be thought from the singular case, from the particular way in which any given city combines ambition and reason, affects and knowledge. For Balibar this is not just a reading of Spinoza, but could be understood to be a general thesis about politics in general, which is always situated between reason, on the fundamental thesis that "nothing is more useful to man than man," that we benefit from living in a society, from the way in which living among others makes our lives better than a solitary life. This fact is true of any society which has an irreducible dimension of utility. At the same time every society is founded on an imaginary institution, an image of what it means to be in a city, what it means to be human. Every city is both rational and imagined, and this contradictory unity of these two scenes exists in each specific case. As much as it is possible to push the city to become more rational, which is to say less exclusive and hierarchal, it is never possible to dispense with the other scene entirely. This limit acts back on political philosophy itself, as Balibar argues any attempt to think through the relation of Spinoza and Marx must necessarily recognize the limit of each to think the other scene. As Balibar writes, It would be easy to conclude that Marx is basically unaware of the "other scene" of politics, the scene of communitarian affiliation, and therefore unaware of symbolic violence as well (although he names it or has bequeathed us with the word ideology, one of the aptest names for it); and to conclude that Spinoza, for his part, basically ignores the irreducible level of economic antagonism (doubtless because, at the economic level, where conatus can perhaps be conceived of as a "productive force," Spinoza is basically an optimist and a utilitarian" (Balibar 2015: 12)  The dialectic of imagination and reason means that any philosophy that focuses on reason, on individual or collective interest as the basis of politics, must necessarily contend with imaginary identifications, and any politics of the imagination, or imagined communities, must necessarily contend with the rational basis of any social relation.
It is possible to map these two dialectics onto each other, to argue that reason is utility and vice versa, since nothing is more useful to man than man, and, at the same time, that authority is constituted in an through the imagination, since authority, that which cannot be contested often passes through the theological, which is to say superstition which is founded upon the imagination. However, what I would like to suggest is that we see the dialectic of utility and authority and that of imagination and reason as two fundamentally different dialectics, which intersect without necessarily reflecting each other. This is in part because, as Vardoulakis argues, authority cannot be neatly mapped onto the imagination even as it passes through it especially in those forms inflected by religion and superstition. Authority exists in part because humanity does not always recognize what is useful, namely that a political order which combines the efforts of each, is useful. For those who do not recognized the utility of society, or more to the point, those who do not recognize it in the moment, since we see the better and do the worse from time to time, we are all social and anti-social, authority provides another foundation for society. Authority is a necessary supplement to the rational basis of society, and as such it could be described as a rational irrationality, or a-rationality. Authority which is outside of reason because it cannot be contested by reason has a rational basis, or to put it more succinctly, sometimes there is a utility to authority. However, at the exact moment that such a claim can be made, a claim that would unite two into one through the expansive sense of utility, they come asunder because if authority is useful, a necessary supplement to the rational understanding of society, than it can be evaluated in terms of its utility. This is what Negri identifies as the historical criticism of religion. Religion, it is argued, played its part in sustaining and bringing together the human community during a period in which it could not govern itself, as in the case of Moses leading his people out of slavery, but it is no longer useful, creating conflict rather than accord, and functioning as a fetter on the powers and forces of society. Any attempt to unify authority and utility into one term, make authority useful or utility itself authority, necessarily fails, producing its opposite. The two dialectics could also be differentiated in terms of their specific foundations. Imagination and reason are grounded on an anthropological basis, on humanities capacity to affect and be affected. The two images of humanity, the one defined by utility and rationality is an concept of humanity, while the other, that of the imagined community is an image, and like all images it is defined by the bodies inability to hold multiple images together. All images of humanity, or of a common community, are necessarily shaped by particular images of society. In contrast to this, authority is less an anthropological fact than a particular institution, it is artificial, or more to the point it is an attempt to contend with the artificial ground of any social order. This is why there is an appeal to the theological in those moments of foundation. As much as the two dialectics overlap, as reason and utility are two different expressions of the same thing, and imagination and authority pass through the same relation to the past, they cannot be said to be the same thing, the political or institutional cannot be reduced to the anthropological and vice versa. The two different dialectical reflect the fundamental fact that any given political order is at once an effect of anthropology, stemming from human reason and imagination, but exceeds it in that any political order cannot be reduced to imagination and reason. This brings us to what could be considered the third moment of the spinozist dialectic, one that pushes it furthest from a Hegelian understanding, if the first is to be found in the unity of opposites, a basic criteria for a dialectic, and the second in the non-teleology, or, to say the same thing differently in the historical specificity of its resolution, then the third moment is in the necessary overdetermination of the dialectic itself. There is never anything like a contradiction, or even a central contradiction, which would be able to encompass the totality of the historical moment. It is not a matter of a dialectic of authority and utility, of reason and imagination, or of affect and concept, to add another figure but of the necessary overdetermination of any dialectic, as reason and imagination, utility and authority intersect with and complicate each other. This is only to name the two we have briefly considered here, we could also consider the dialectic of desire and the affects which have been explored by Frédéric Lordon. The merit of Vardoulakis book is not just that he has given us a new contradiction, that of authority and utility, which remain outside of the scope of most discussions of Spinoza, but that in insisting on the dialectical dimension of that relation he offers a way to not only encompass the others, but brings us that closer to thinking together Spinoza and dialectical thought.

 Because actual history is rarely linear, let alone teleological, I read the repudiation of Hegel before I ever read Hegel. I had read arguments and polemics against Hegel in Althusser, Deleuze, and Foucault long before I had every cracked Hegel's books. A funny thing happened once I started reading, writing, and teaching Hegel, is that I started to warm up to him. It was not the idea of spirit that appealed to me, or even the dialectic as some overarching logic, but the more limited, finite dialectics of the different figures and moments of consciousness. If you need an example of what I am talking about just think of the famous dialectic of master and slave, the hit single of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This passage has been separated from the progression of spirit to take on a life of its own as a way to discuss everything from desire to anti-colonial violence. However, hit singles have a way of overshadowing the whole album. I have often thought that Hegel's Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right offer more than just that famous struggle, the figures of the stoic, sceptic, unhappy conscious, the struggle of culture and alienation, faith and enlightenment, could be liberated from the development of spirit, to become ways of thinking about the current state of spirit, which appears less and less as a culmination of progress than a motley accumulation of everything every believed. It is for this reason that I was delighted to learn of Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit. One aspect of this book is an attempt to put the figures of Hegel's Phenomenology, to work; the master and slave, but also the stoic, sceptic, and unhappy consciousness become critical figures of subjectivity, and not just moments of the development of spirit. It puts these figures to work in relation to figures of black struggle and thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, reading what could be called "the black radical tradition" as something more than a series of political contestations and positions, to see it as having its own intellectual foundation and development, even as counters the trajectory that Hegel charted. Gray and Johnson sometimes contrast Hegel's figure with the reality and history of black struggle. This can be seen clearly in the contrast between Douglass' struggle for freedom and Hegel's concept of the master/slave struggle. As Gray and Johnson write, "The lord' and the 'bondsman,' then are logical (dis)positions, figures who are both more and less than the historical people who were enslaved and who were exercising domination. 'The slave' had names. 'The master' did, too. And these names make a difference. They make differences." Logic and history connect and part ways. In Hegel's account the bondsman condition begins with fight, a struggle for recognition, and ends in work, work providing a sense of recognition that could not be found in struggle. Douglass' history inverts this order. As Gray and Johnson write,"With American chattel slavery, however, work was not the way out of slavery but the brutal institutions very engine. The more a slave worked, the stronger was the institution...In chattel slavery, work will never set you free. Work reinforces the chains and sharpens the sting of the whip. Douglass worked had and long, and saw himself in the fields, landscapes, ships and other objects into which he put his transforming labor. Yet freedom never came to him from work. The only way for him to set out on the path out of slavery and into freedom was to turn away from the object. on which he worked and face the master in order to fight."Gray and Johnson's analysis here cites and joins Chamayou's discussion of slave hunts, in which the historical inquiry calls into question the conceptual logic. Work cannot function as the basis for recognition in a system based on reducing human beings to their capacity for work. It is only the fight, the struggle that can break this logic. If Douglass deviates from Hegel's figures of subjectivity other historical moments would seem to not only confirm it, but Hegel's thought provides the concept that is otherwise missing. Booker T. Washington's ideas of individual freedom, merit, and self-reliance realizes Hegel's idea of stoicism more than even Hegel. The history does not contradict the concept, but confirms it and makes a case for its relevance. As Gray and Johnson write, "Here is a new form of recognition. It is not the recognition of another self-consciousness, directly in the form of self consciousness, but that of future self-consciousness, a higher form of self, or perhaps the promise of being recognized by a truly fair, just, and impartial form of subjectivity, above and beyond any particular determination of race, gender, age, etc., "No man whose vision is bounded by color can come into contact with what is highest and best" ( Washington, Up from Slavery) The recognition that the stoic seeks is not simply another person's recognition, not just recognition from this white man or Black man, but a general recognition from an ideal person. It is recognition of a hard earned merit that is mine."Reading Washington through Hegel makes it possible to see how the stoic appears not just once, as a figure of progression, but again and again, as a turn inward for recognition when the world becomes unreliable. It also makes it possible to see that Hegel's attachment to work, to work as an ethical ideal is less a matter of his own system, than the grey on grey of a philosopher reflecting the general norms of his time.  It also makes it possible to see in Washington not just a specific figure from one period, but something more of a refrain as stoicism, self-reliance, and merit, appear again and again as a conservative response to racism. The conservative attempt to reduce Martin Luther King Jr. to some future date where people would be judged only by the content of their character, to merit, is really an attempt to turn King into Washington. Speaking of King, it is with respect to King that we can see the real strength of Gray and Johnson's reading. As much as Hegel gives us figures of individual consciousness, stoicism, scepticism, etc., that can be seen not just once in the linear progression of history but appearing again and again, his real goal was to think something other than the individual, to think spirit as universality, sociality, or even transindividuality. In Gray and Johnson's reading of the black radical tradition this problem of collectivity appears again and again as the struggle of the individual, King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis, to transcend individuality in their very individual struggle. This is what Hegel's unhappy consciousness makes it possible to think. As Gray and Johnson write:"Here is where the trouble lies: sacramental work is, undeniably the individual's work, in this case King's work. Put differently although this working is supposed to deny the self and attribute everything to God, it actually reaffirms the essentiality of the finite self, while God is reduced to a superficial element. At best, sacramental work and desire is done in the name of God. The same failure to to renounce and surrender oneself also applies to labour as a form of gratitude. The 'entire movement,' writes Hegel, 'is reflected not only in the actual desiring, working, and enjoyment, but even in the very giving thanks where the reverse seems to take place in the extreme of individuality' (Phenomenology of Spirit). The reason: we are the ones working on and changing things, while God is just a fictional idea, a fancy name, that contributes nothing to our work. We are the ones working, day in and day out; we finite persons change the world; no one and nothing but us. The individual self tried to overcome itself through work, to act merely as an instrument in God's handmade plan, but it inevitably ends up emboldening itself."Unhappy Consciousness returns from the medieval world of Christianity to become the dialectic of the modern movement and leader. The more the leader devotes him or herself in works, the more that devotion and dedication becomes the work. As Gray and Johnson argue the figures of the sixties and seventies, King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis eventually give way to collective movements, to the Panthers, and Black Power as a new figure of reason (in Hegel's terminology), or collective consciousness, in ours. I have picked three moments from Gray and Johnson's book to illustrate the different relations between concept and history at work in the book, three different ways that it thinks the relation between its two different topics, Hegel and the black radical tradition. The relation between Hegel and the black radical tradition is sometimes one of negation, as the history of struggle in the case of Douglass negates the concept of struggle in Hegel; sometimes one of affirmation, as the philosophical concepts reveal and illustrate what is at stake in the political position of Washington; and ultimately it is one of transformation, as the dialectic of philosopher and history, contemplation and contestation, individual and community, pushes towards something else, pushes us to think through the limits of the civil rights era with its larger than life figures. As a last word I will cite a line that Gray and Johnson write with respect to Angela Davis' idea of coalition politics, but I think that such an idea can be used to describe the book's own strange coalition of Hegel and politics. "Difference, conjunction, and contradiction generate, rather than impede, political momentum." 

En el actual mundo de conexiones transversales la cultura se expande entre diversos ámbitos de conocimiento, este contexto hace más necesaria hoy una visión expandida de las posibilidades de interacción entre disciplinas, como ofrecen los procesos de diseño por su propia naturaleza proyectista. El diseño propicia un campo de exploración donde la experimentación, los procesos creativos, los servicios y tangibles construyen hoy nuevas visiones que procuran nuevas formas de vida. Este número monográfico Umática. Arte y diseño: transferencias, metodologías y futuros ha tratado de hacer una aproximación a estas visiones contemporáneas. Hay cuestiones tradicionales del ámbito del diseño que se van desplazando del centro de los debates, como puede ser el dogma de la búsqueda de soluciones (nuevas soluciones a viejos problemas), cuando emerge la necesidad real de formular nuevas preguntas. Todo se pone en cuestión en un tiempo de cambio e incertidumbre, donde todo se re-diseña, se re-dimensiona, se re-cicla… desde la visión de lo cotidiano, de lo más humano, de lo social, etc., sin grandes ambiciones corporativistas, dando respuesta a un tiempo venidero. Cómo serán los escenarios y los objetos que nos acompañarán en nuestras vidas. Es momento de revisar los modelos y metodologías de ideación y creación que ya se aplican y que, probablemente, no son visibles en los propios resultados de los procesos y soluciones de diseño. Como viene siendo habitual en las secciones de Umática en la que investigadores y creadores contribuyen con sus aportaciones. Ampliamos nuestro horizonte incluyendo a los diseñadores para revisar las claves teóricas, metodológicas y prácticas en los procesos creativos implícitos, por igual, en las prácticas artísticas y del diseño. Este nexo de arte y diseño forma parte del eje que se plantea en este número, donde se entiende éste como una «categoría conceptual», como manifestación visual de la creatividad previa al desarrollo de un proyecto, como proceso de configuración intelectual de una propuesta, independientemente de la disciplina u oficio que la materialice. Desde donde las artes y el diseño comparten metodologías y herramientas disruptivas apropiadas para procesos de experimentación e innovación, transferibles a otros sectores para el desarrollo de la creatividad. La relación entre las artes y el diseño ha sido uno de los vectores clave, en su alcance sociocultural y transformador, tratados en este monográfico. En el contexto de la investigación desarrollada en Bellas Artes se estudian las relaciones y puntos de encuentro entre estas dos disciplinas: sus convergencias y divergencias. Las identidades, los productos y la experiencia en su relación con el cambio social o el patrimonio cultural y artístico. En ¿Qué es una imagen menor? Pablo Caldera, nos ofrece un artículo que, aunque fuera de la línea propuesta de este monográfico, es consistente con las aspiraciones discursivas generales de Umática. Un texto que ofrece una reflexión crítica sobre la concepción canónica de la teoría de la imagen y que complementa otros artículos publicados en números anteriores (Giribet (2020), Abalía (2018) o Kurażyńska y Cabrera (2018)). Su análisis se centra en el estudio de la autorrepresentación a través de las prácticas visuales de la subalternidad y de la idea de sujeto colectivo desde el concepto de "imagen menor" (Deleuze y Guattari, 1975). Este artículo entronca con una línea crítica que podemos rastrear desde la década de los años ochenta desde planteamientos feministas (Pollock, 2001; Hall, 1990; Butler, 2018) y teorías postcoloniales (Mignolo, 2010; Spivak, 2010), la contextualización desde la imagen digital y la democratización en su uso en la actualidad (Highfield, 2016; Raun, 2016). La diferenciación imagen mayor – imagen menor puede servir, según Caldera, como preámbulo para una prometedora investigación en torno a la facultad política de las imágenes, vinculando éstas a su capacidad deíctica, sus procesos de difusión y producción y su contextualización museística y cultural. En el artículo "Rebeldía objetual en tiempos de des-nomalización de la funcionalidad" Sebastián Tedesco analiza los encuentros y desencuentros que el arte y el diseño han mantenido a lo largo de los años. Se trata de una revisión sistemática de las obras de artistas contemporáneos argentinos sobre la des-normalización de la funcionalidad objetual (Keller et al, 2019). Otro análisis es el que Alan Neumarkt lleva a cabo en su artículo Una mirada "cromática" al diseño industrial sudamericano, que trata el objeto como sujeto temático, conceptual y operativo, en los 10 países sudamericanos. Fundamenta su análisis en la división geográfica estudiando el color en relación con la cultura de cada país, su influencia y mestizaje dentro del campo del diseño industrial (Neumarkt, 2021). La revisión de un objeto artesanal, el botijo, es estudiado y reinterpretado por Ulises Moya en "Mojado Una revisión del botijo a través de material y el proceso de fabricación" a través de la desvinculación del icono del botijo, repensando su forma y contexto. Por último el artículo publicado en Diálogos: "La Paloma de la Paz, de Picasso, emblema de la Universidad de Málaga", de Sebastián García Garrido. Propone una revisión de esta imagen de referencia de la universidad desde 1975 en un nuevo símbolo, a través de un ejercicio de síntesis y sencillez gráfica (García Garrido, 2010). Un logotipo corporativo propio, una interpretación contemporánea. El segundo vector, Metodologías de ideación y creación propone un juego de experimentación a través de las estrategias de ideación y creación y los diversos lenguajes, desde los soportes a las experiencias múltiples. A través de estrategias creativas y metodologías del diseño, que inciden en el diseño colaborativo y de intervención pública. El artículo sobre sociedad y transferencia de Ana García "Investigación en Diseño, Arte y tecnología como base de resiliencia e innovación" plantea la necesidad de construir sinergias que permitan, a través del arte, la transformación social y económica, de la mano de la innovación tecnológica y teniendo en cuenta aspectos de sensibilidad medioambiental. Dos son los ensayos visuales abordados en ese número asociados a este vector. En primer lugar "Todos con Proteo, La paradoja del fuego destructor que dio vida a un movimiento solidario" elaborado por Jorge Amat. La campaña publicitaria presentada en este ensayo se fundamenta en una estrategia creativa que cuenta con la participación comprometida de diversos colectivos sociales, en respuesta a un hecho dramático: el incendio sufrido por la emblemática librería malagueña Proteo. Como decía Bakunin: "la pasión de la destrucción también es una pasión creativa" (Leier, 2007). El segundo ensayo es un juego de retórica visual desarrollado por Narita Estudio para el teatro Soho CaixaBank: Maskom en el Teatro Soho Caixabank. Un ensayo de retórica visual". Una promoción publicitaria construida a través de productos comestibles que conforman un conjunto de carteles de grandes obras de la historia del teatro. Una campaña que consigue imbricar, relacionar, dos ámbitos bien distintos: la cultura y los productos alimentarios. El tercer vector, El diseño de futuro lo sitúa como factor clave del desarrollo de una sociedad más sostenible y ética alineada con los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible. Cuál es el alcance valor del diseño sobre los aspectos éticos y globales del tiempo al que nos enfrentamos. Nuevas soluciones para la mejora de nuestra vida diaria como "Corkwood", un nuevo materialnatural, renovable y sostenible. Una materia prima única para comunicar naturaleza y sostenibilidad, de Miguel Ángel Sánchez. Iniciativas COIL de Diseño Gráfico en tiempos de Pandemia: aprendizaje basado en proyectos culturales, de Mariana Soraya y Diseñando para el Planeta, de Teresa Frangueiro tratan la implicación del diseño y los diseñadores en el reto colectivo de la transformación social. El proyecto de Miguel Angel Sánchez Martín, Corkwood, presenta un nuevo material natural, renovable y sostenible. Una materia prima única para comunicar naturaleza y sostenibilidad, en una combinación entre diseño y materiales naturales, renovables y reciclables. Y siempre desde la originalidad y la sostenibilidad, para describirnos el proceso empírico-científico donde se muestran sus excelentes propiedades físicas, químicas y mecánicas, además de su excelente comportamiento frente al ruido. Otro proyecto es Iniciativas COIL de Diseño Gráfico en tiempos de Pandemia: aprendizaje basado en proyectos culturales de Mariana Soraya Lozada Mondragón, que aborda la concepción del diseño como una herramienta de transformación social. Desde este enfoque, el diseño se convierte en un instrumento estratégico que los diseñadores pueden emplear como catalizador del cambio social. Y que destaca por la colaboración entre la comunidad educativa de dos países vecinos a través de la iniciativa COIL. La profesora Teresa Franqueira, directora de Design Factory de Aveiro (Portugal), en su artículo "Diseñando para el planeta" aborda el reconocimiento del diseño como disciplina transversal a varias áreas del conocimiento: ciencias sociales, humanidades, artes e ingeniería, para cuestionar la responsabilidad de los profesionales del diseño frente a los cambios que está viviendo la sociedad. Con una aguda y autocrítica mirada de diseñadora nos pregunta: ¿Estamos haciendo lo suficiente? Porque en la sociedad subyace una percepción donde se ve que muchos agentes independientes se organizan en múltiples acciones comunitarias para defender el planeta, pero en estos movimientos sociales no se ve que los diseñadores tengan una actitud proactiva para detectar problemas, para anticiparse a los cambios ni mucho menos para generar proyectos innovadores. Ante esta falta de posicionamiento podemos entender que en parte de la sociedad persista la visión del diseño como un agente responsable de los problemas que ha generado el sistema de producción y consumo que vivimos, y que ahora, cuando las dificultades nos rodean, no está del lado de la solución. Por este motivo la autora plantea la urgencia de reorientar la actividad docente e investigadora del diseño en el área de la innovación social y la sostenibilidad, eso siempre y cuando queramos evitar la tremenda crisis medioambiental que se nos avecina en pocos años. Su posición es que los diseñadores debemos actuar como facilitadores de ideas, como visualizadores de soluciones y como un nexo entre los agentes públicos y privados para construir nuevos espacios compartidos, participativos y colectivos. Por último, abre la portada y cierra la editorial de este último número Buscando, desde lo inexacto, el círculo perfecto II, 2017 (Gimeno, 2019, p. 118). Acrílico sobre lienzo del diseñador Pepe Gimeno, Premio Nacional de Diseño 2020, una imagen simbólica de las relaciones e interacciones entre Arte y Diseño.

La edición recurrente de teorías monádicas, la repetición por inercia de discursos cerrados y unilaterales de izquierdas y derechas intelectuales, la profusión de nuevos relatos proféticos de algunas autoridades filosóficas en torno a modelos del pensar, hacen creer que el fantasma de Leibniz –que concibió entes metafísicos cerrados en sí mismos como elementos últimos del universo–, permanece concentrado en la cera del oído de estos sacerdotes de la verdad. La falta de ventanasLeibniz consideraba que las mónadas se encontraban distribuidas en el universo, no tenían ventanas comunicantes y su orden estaba armoniosamente preestablecido por Dios. Por este motivo, puede decirse que el pluralismo leibniziano está dado por la diversidad con que concibió a las mónadas. El problema reside en su comunicación. Los paradigmas de la diversidad y la interculturalidad, hoy lugar común de cualquier intelectual, dejan de serlo cuando inmersos en la acción se deja de lado lo razonable.En la cotidianeidad, en el ser ahí, la verdad vuelta mónada, repetida infinitamente como substancia independiente, es aperceptible de su propia territorialidad y rechaza de manera irresponsable y nihilista a las otras mónadas que intentan acercarse. De este modo, las verdades son lo que aparece como verdadero, cada una de ellas monádicamente constituida, y por supuesto, sin ventanas. En el discurso grandilocuente académico se manifiestan pegoteadas como una endometriosis de cerebro en quienes encuentran su seguridad en discursos religiosos y políticos de héroes, no pocas veces marionetas deificadas.Las verdades están celulificadas, reconstruidas en pequeñas aldeas con tiempos de vida determinados por su permanente contraste. Son mónadas con fecha de vencimiento, caídas en "aldeas infantiles" o nihilizadas por su propia paranoia e inseguridad. Cuando las abordamos, las adquirimos en un bazar de productos importados. Luego las articulamos en un contexto específico que permite el ingreso de otras mónadas, pero alojándolas en el cuarto de huéspedes y criticando su forma de ser y vestirse. Le llevamos el desayuno a la cama durante la mañana, le hablamos de interculturalidad y diversidad por la tarde, y esperamos ansiosamente que vuelva a su contexto originario de donde nunca debió haber salido. Resulta muy difícil construir mónadas a partir de un contexto, pareciera ser que los pensadores sólo tienen que "apropiárselas", para utilizarlas correctamente a posteriori.Destino de todo discursoLa historia de las ideas y su producción permanente e inacabable de teorías, tiende a maquinizar cualquier discurso y volverlo monádico, aun cuando el autor original no lo desee. Marx dijo que él no era marxista. Seguramente Freud hoy ya no sería psicoanalista. La monadización de las ideas es una constante de los seguidores o especialistas de los grandes pensadores que pretenden profundizar ideas circunscribiendo o rumiando la originalidad de su creador, cuando en realidad lo que el pensador hizo fue todo lo contrario, se salió del surco, construyó con audacia, quizás "deliró", desde una modalidad diferente a la del pensamiento cristalizado y erudito. La denuncia delirante se reconstruye como nueva verdad cuando logra sacar del fondo del abismo las teorías que fueron llevadas allí por sus seguidores y profundizadores. Deleuze deliró con la máquina deseante sacando del fondo del abismo a un Freud consumido por el complejo de Edipo de sus propios seguidores–hijos.La pretensión de verdad, criticada aquí por su cerrazón, se pone el velo ocultando su sexualidad. Pero esto no sólo ocurre en el orden de las ideas o teorías filosóficas, sino que en la cotidianeidad vivimos enmarcados y rodeados por el constante sonido del discurso monádico.Esta discursividad monádica, expresada en una cotidianidad marcada por la inercia de su movimiento, le quita el carácter gonádico a la teorización, concibiendo a su propio cuerpo como cárcel del alma, asegurando que "sus genitales son la cárcel de su pasión". Estos discursos, signados semánticamente por su pretensión de verdad, dejan sin funcionalidad lo orgánico de cada teoría, constituyendo verdades pequeñas e impotentes ideológicamente. De este modo, logramos descubrir que los discursos políticos aparentemente fálicos y penetrantes, se desinflan a la hora de desarrollar lo prometido en circunstancias precisas. Esto mismo ocurre con algunos discursos filosóficos, que se instalan como lugar común analítico, pero su propio sentido crítico pierde su fuerza cuando debe ser aplicado. El discurso foucaultiano, se ha instalado fálicamente en el campo de la las ciencias de la educación en torno a los mecanismos de "control de los cuerpos", a través del "panoptismo" o del "examen". Esta aparente fecundidad de la teoría, se vuelve impotente cuando se encuentra, por ejemplo, ante una población adolescente violentamente descontrolada.El tiempo político conduce a simplificarLa militancia política sólo valora el monádico ser occidental, héroe he-maniano, que saca su espada y grita "yo tengo el poder". Este modelo avalado por el sistema de seguimientos y alianzas construye un zoon politikon, que se encuentra muy alejado del "estar siendo" kuscheano. Porque Rodolfo Kusch, en realidad, en su libro América profunda realizó una distinción entre el "ser europeo" y el "estar siendo latinoamericano" muy interesante y motivadora –que quizás se conecta con la decisión de Heiddeger de incorporar el tiempo al ser–.Sin embargo, aquella visión del poder es proclamada con gran fuerza en el discurso universitario y académico-gremial, sobre todo de izquierda. Enredada en sus propias cuerdas ideológicas, manifiesta lo latente de su discurso sólo cuando la realidad lleva a involucrar el cuerpo. Su actuación suele denotar inocultables elementos autoritarios. A quienes no coinciden con su forma de concebir el mundo o la economía, se los "ningunea", y así la diversidad se olvida y la mónada, una vez más, vuelve a cerrarse.En estos tiempos de elecciones, en Uruguay y Argentina, resulta muy interesante analizar la miseria de los discursos políticos. Como argentino siento vergüenza ajena al escuchar lo que los medios de comunicación consideran importante en una campaña política. Algunos ciudadanos, siempre "animales políticos", cuando son políticos parecen invertir el adjetivo, y en tanto políticos animales (politikon zoo) se animan a decir disparates sin mediar ningún tipo de moderación o respeto del contrincante. La virulencia discursiva y la violencia instalada en los diálogos cotidianos, atraen a votantes apasionados por una supuesta ideología generalmente inconfesable.De la fascinación autista a la complejidad¿Por qué es tan atrayente este tipo de discurso? ¿Por qué las verdades planteadas como mónadas cerradas en discursos emotivos nos atraen como votantes? ¿Por qué eso ocurre, muy precisamente, ante la construcción de discursos cerrados en sí mismos y presentados como autoconsistentes?Gödel en su segundo Teorema de la Incompletitud afirma que "Si se puede demostrar que un sistema axiomático es consistente a partir de sí mismo, entonces es inconsistente". Pero los discursos políticos monádicos apuntan a estimular el público electoral con el objetivo de obtener de los votantes no sólo su aplauso sino también su voto. Sería una gran sorpresa que algún candidato propusiera una plataforma política que se refiera a sí misma como inconsistente porque necesita de los otros. Seguramente nadie lo votaría.Me permito soñar con mónadas aventanadas, con discursos integradores, con una militancia política que permita el diálogo y no la exigencia perpetua de participación con su consecuente entrega a una vida ascética dominada por el sacrificio por el partido. El monadismo militante dice con fuerte acento "a los jóvenes no les interesa la política, no les interesa la ética, no les interesa debatir, ni discutir". Quizás hasta podemos pensar que la negación desarrollada por la juventud es una cuestión ética. La pragmática militancia a la cual estamos acostumbrados, al menos en Argentina, nos lleva a muchos a relegar el compromiso con esos ideales monádicos empapados de mecanismos corruptos.Mi madre siempre repite en casos de discriminación a los sectores populares "la miseria tiene cara de hereje". Sin duda, los prejuicios existentes en cada una de nuestras sociedades, desde el miedo algo paranoico de muchos montevideanos a los "planchas" hasta la discriminación profunda que sufren las comunidades bolivianas en Buenos Aires, parecen ser fiel reflejo de nuestro funcionamiento cognitivo monádico. Esas construcciones se han tornado arquetípicas en nuestras sociedades pese a mucha reflexión en contrario. En las opiniones surgidas de la inmediatez del diálogo cotidiano seguimos analizando desde ciertos prejuicios la negación de la otredad, pero a la hora de sentarnos a desarrollar un pensamiento filosófico sería mejor pensar desde el paradigma de la complejidad.A la hora de la verdadA muchos les pasa que cuando analizan la cuestión de género lo hacen en un espacio de producción de la libertad y la construcción de la diversidad. Sin embargo, cuando hablamos con nuestras compañeras de vida, y nos imaginamos la vida de nuestros hijos, enseguida pensamos en su sexualidad y nos decimos mutuamente: "espero no nos salga gay". El diálogo evidentemente monádico se contradice con nuestra vida intelectual. No sólo la frase se repite hasta el infinito en muchas parejas sino que en ningún momento se discute el "nos salga" como algo mágico que cae como maldición sobre el cuerpo de nuestro hijo o hija.En círculos cotidianos de discusión el monadismo intelectual es el tópico común. Sin ser rechazados, desde paradigmas interpretativos totalmente cerrados en sí mismos, podemos plantear cuestiones que parecen ser políticamente correctas en ámbitos del pensamiento "de izquierda", pero si reflexionamos sobre sus ventanas cerradas, fácilmente surge la inconsistencia argumentativa del discurso. La difusión mediática de ciertos conflictos internacionales suele dar pie para opinar de problemas históricamente complejos, que instala ideológicamente de un lado o de otro de las categorizaciones convencionales. Pero si se examinan con detenimiento parecen tener en si mismos una existencia esquizoide. ¿Sus discursos son de izquierda y de derecha al mismo tiempo?Para abrir ventanasLa ventana de una mónada conceptual sólo se abre cuando está vinculada con otra mónada. De este modo, no puede entenderse la complejidad conceptual de una cuestión si primero no se acepta que la diversidad de representaciones hará que las ideas explicativas aparezcan en redes interconectadas, estando sus elementos generalmente opuestos. El principio de no contradicción no puede ser tenido demasiado en cuenta a la hora de intentar comprender las mónadas "aventanadas".En los ámbitos académicos se repite hasta el cansancio lugares comunes posmodernos como "la caída de los grandes relatos" "la caída de las ideologías" "la relatividad de la verdad o las verdades relativas", "los conceptos cerrados ya no explican toda la realidad, hay que pensar en conceptos imagen".Pero ante esas expresiones, sugiero difundir entre nosotros como si fuese un refrán "la verdad tiene cara de hereje". El egocentrismo del monadismo conceptual acusa de hereje al que quiere afirmar su propia seguridad, y expulsa toda otra pretensión de verdad. Este egocentrismo monádico quizás levante teorías edificantes con gran facilidad, pero si como simples peatones curiosos rodeamos su construcción podremos ver su lado oculto repleto de preguntas. *De nacionalidad argentina, reside en Buenos Aires donde ejerce la docencia. Es Profesor de Filosofía y Ciencias de la Educación. Egresado del Centro Salesiano de Estudios de Buenos Aires (CESBA). Estudiante de la Licenciatura en Educación en la Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.

 Like so many I was saddened to learn of the death of Toni Negri. I never really knew him as a person, only very awkwardly meeting him once, but he was someone who fundamentally shaped and transformed philosophy for me. I wrote my first published paper on Negri, a paper that, as is the case with most seminar papers, was an attempt to make sense of the two books I had read, The Savage Anomaly and Marx Beyond Marx.  That it was published is not the important part, really a product of grad school hubris, the important part was that I am not sure if I would have stayed in grad school had I not written it, or found someone willing to read and discuss it with me, shoutout here to Bill Haver. Negri made it possible for me to conjoin doing philosophy and engaging the world politically, to see these as two sides of the same process, the same practice of philosophy. I should mention that this was before Empire, but just barely. I am not saying that to claim that I was into Negri before he was cool, but just that my first encounter with Negri was in some sense with an outsider. He was rarely talked about in classes, and his books were more associated with the para-academic presses of Autonomedia and Semiotexte than the presses that were translating and publishing the big names of theory, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.With the news of his death I started to think about Negri again for the first time in awhile. I had not read anything by Negri in years (the little book on Spinoza was probably the last), nor really engaged with his writings in a long time. Philosophers still have their effects, still shape our thought long after we stop directly reading and writing about them. It just so happened the day that I learned of Negri's death was the day that we met for the Spinoza and Marx seminar. We spent part of the time talking about the importance of Negri's reading. He was not the first Marxist/Spinozist, but Marx-Spinozism would be fundamentally different without him. This is because Negri puts the intersection of metaphysics and politics, ontology and history at the center of his reading of Spinoza  It is well known that Spinoza interrupted his writing of the Ethics, a book he had worked on for years, to write and publish anonymously the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, as political intervention. For Negri this interruption is also a fundamental transformation: Spinoza's engagement with politics and history, with the historical force of the imagination, with the politics of affects, and the reality of power, transforms his understanding of imagination, affects, and power in the Ethics. As Negri writes in a passage that I have cited more than once, and returned to again and again. "After the development of such a radical pars destruens, after the identification of a solid point of support by which the metaphysical perspective re-opens, the elaboration of the pars construens requires a practical moment. The ethics could not be constituted in a project, in the metaphysics of the mode and of reality, if it were not inserted into history, into politics, into the phenomenology of a single and collective life: if it were not to derive new nourishment from that engagement."Negri effectively inverted our image of Spinoza, and with it our image of philosophy, it was no longer a matter of detaching oneself from history and politics in order to contemplate the world, of thinking sub specie aeternitas, but of plunging oneself into the historical moment in order to transform philosophy.In a piece I wrote on Negri that was recently republished in The Production of Subjectivity: Marx and Philosophy I described this transformation as follows:"While the Theologico-Political Treatise constitutes a fundamental displacement of the problems of the Ethics, from order as metaphysical problem to the historicity of the organization of human desires and beliefs, it does not complete this process. The Theologico-Political Treatise does not supplant the Ethics. Negri argues that the Treatise does not follow through on its most radical insights. It begins with the materiality of the imagination, with the power of constitutive praxis, but it ultimately crashes upon the universals of 'natural right' and the 'natural light of religion', universals which undermine the constitutive process. The contract subordinates the powers of society to a transcendent order and a pre-constituted end, thereby limiting the constitutive process. However, the results of the Treatise are fundamentally ambiguous: as much as the contract is introduced as an ordering structure of society, it is modified by the idea of power. As Spinoza writes, 'Nature's right is co-extensive with her power'. This redefinition of right as power fundamentally undermines two of the constitutive dimensions of natural right that philosophy exemplified by the contract, 'the absolute conception of the individual foundation and the absolute conception of the contractual passage'. In place of the absolutely individualistic foundation that paves the way for the absolute authority of the sovereign, Spinoza introduces a new theoretical object, the 'passions of the body social'. Right is coextensive with power: there is no natural state of power nor a final goal, only the historicity of its various organizations. There is thus no transfer of power, no actual passage from potentia to potestas, there is just the organization of potentia, of the striving (conatus), desire (cupiditas), and affects of the multitude. It is precisely this organization that is examined and developed in what Negri calls the 'second foundation' of the Ethics, Parts III and IV which develop the logic and sociability of the passions. This second foundation does not only develop the idea of conatus as the essence of each individual (EIIIP7), it also develops the logic of the affects as the determination of this desire. The affects begin with the most immediate, and simple, determinations – pain, pleasure, love and hate – and gradually unfold to encompass the constitutive conditions and constitutive power of subjectivity, which is not an autonomous starting point but is immersed in the power of affects. 'The nexus of composition, complexity, conflictiveness, and dynamism is a continual nexus of successive dislocations that are neither dialectical nor linear but, rather, discontinuous'. Thus, as much as the Theologico-Political Treatise disrupts the remnants of a metaphysical order, its provocation that the historicity of desire and affects are constitutive of the world, it demands a renewed ontological speculation. It is not the Theologico-Political Treatise or the Ethics that makes up the foundational book of constitutive power, but rather the movement, the displacement, from the one to the other. In Negri's book on Spinoza this movement continues to a reading of the Political Treatise, thus passing from metaphysics (the Ethics) to politics (the Theological Political Treatise) only to return to politics (Political Treatise) which in turn informs a new metaphysics (the 'multitude' as a concept produced in the interstices of the Ethics and the Political Treatise), while at the same time stating that 'Spinoza's true politics is his metaphysics'. This statement should be read not as a choice, placing Spinoza's metaphysical works over his political writings, but as a slogan of displacement. Constitutive power as praxis is developed through a practice of philosophy as a continual displacement that moves from metaphysics to politics and back, and this movement continues beyond a reading of Spinoza."One can find a similar trajectory of movement in Negri's thought in his reading of Marx in which it is the same concepts, most specifically "living labor" that traverse a line from economics, to ontology, and then to politics. Negri reading of Marx, especially in the book known in the US as Insurgencies, but in the rest of the world as Constituent Power, reads the early Marx's idea of democracy back into the latter Marx. Marx's politics is his metaphysics, is labor as the constitution of the world. As Negri writes, "As long as we follow the political Marx, political revolution and social emancipation are two historical matrices that intersect on the same terrain—the constitutional terrain—but still in an external manner, without a metaphysical logic of this intersection being given…This necessity resides at the core of Marx's theory of capital, where living labor appears as the foundation, and the motor of all production, development, and innovation. This essential source also animates the center of our investigation. Living labor against dead labor, constituent power against constituted power: this single polarity runs through the whole schema of Marxist analysis and resolves it in an entirely original theoretical practical totality."What I have tried to focus on here is what I have called, following Althusser and Balibar, is Negri's practice of philosophy, his way of doing philosophy (this was also the focus of the essay cited above). It is a trajectory which constantly moves from history and politics into ontology and from ontology into politics and history without ever, it seems to me, using a historical moment to criticize an ontology or developing an ontology that would ground a politics. It is a trajectory of displacement and transformation in which history, politics, and economics transform philosophical speculation, ontology and metaphysics, while at the same time philosophical speculation transform and reimagine the possibility of political practice. It would seem to me that this is the fundamental orientation that defines Negri's thought, and it is this orientation which is eternal, which continues to live, even after the concepts produced by that trajectory pass away, as they would have to being products of a given historical moment. (Here I have to recommend Roberto Nigro's little book Antonio Negri: Une Philosophie de la Subversion, which I read in the week since Negri's death. Nigro reminds us that the question of the historical relevance of particular concepts, was in some sense the central political and philosophical trajectory of not just Negri's thought but of what is called autonomist thought or post-autonomist thought. Concepts like the mass worker, the social worker, general intellect, and multitude are not just different theoretical positions, but also attempts to make sense of the shifting and changing nature of capitalism itself.) What Negri proposed for philosophy is not easy, and I would even argue that not even Negri always did it well. (In some sense this is a specific version of the general problem of doing philosophy after Marx). It is easy to err on both sides, to simply let a historical, economic, or political transformation stand in for a philosophical analysis, or, on the other side, to dissolve the specificity of a historical moment into a general ontological concept. However, as Spinoza wrote, "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." When it is done well such a method of displacement, of pars destruens/pars construens, promises a transformation of both philosophy and politics. (I would say that Negri's Savage Anomaly, Marx Beyond Marx, and the book on constituent power to name a few are nothing less than models of this method). What Negri proposed in his readings of Spinoza and Marx (among others) was nothing less than a transformation of philosophy, to borrow Althusser's formulation, a transformation that would make philosophy radical and materialist--a transformation that is still ongoing, still striving to produce its effects. It is that aspect of Negri's thought which transformed, and continues to transform my approach to philosophy. 

How it started/how it is goingLouis Althusser is most known for his argument regarding an epistemic break between the young and mature Marx. According to Althusser the works of the eighteen forties, most significantly The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, are burdened by a humanist and idealist conception of history that Marx inherited from Feuerbach and Hegel. In this conception capitalism alienates humanity from his or her productive essence. Marx breaks with this influence over the course of the eighteen fifties, eventually developing his own, anti-humanist and materialist philosophy in Capital. Marx broke with his focus on humanity and the human essence to focus on capitalism as a system of relations of exploitation. Althusser in part borrowed this notion of a break, a division between ideology and science, from Spinoza's understanding of the division between the first and second kind of knowledge in the Ethics. Althusser equated the first kind of knowledge with ideology, with the imagination, and the second (and third), with science. That Althusser relied on Spinoza's epistemology to drive a wedge between the young and the old Marx has, as its perhaps unstated corollary, that Spinoza is to be identified with the late Marx, with Capital.The connection is not just Spinoza in general, but the Ethics. It is from the Ethics that Althusser would draw most of his central arguments, not just the epistemic break, but also immanent causality and the theory of ideology. The Spinoza/Marx connection in Althusser is most of all a connection between the Ethics and Capital, those two completed works of maturity. Two recent works on Althusser and Spinoza have not so much questioned this connection, but complicated and expanded it. Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop's Althusser et Spinoza: Détours et Retours, cites an interview from 1966 in which Althusser states, "the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is the Capital of Spinoza, because Spinoza is preoccupied above all with history and politics." This point is further developed in Jean Matthys' Althusser Lecture de Spinoza . Matthys shows that the connection between Spinoza, Marx, and Althusser is the problem of reading. Spinoza reads scripture in order to reveal the hidden text of obedience, its politics; Marx reads political economy in order to find the politics it necessarily cannot admit; and Althusser reads Marx to find the philosophy that he never developed. This is not to discount the emphasis of the Ethics on Althusser's thought, or to argue for some kind of break between the TTP and the Ethics, but to insist on not only different theoretical stakes and objects, such as the theory of reading, and as Matthys argues, a different idea of what it means to do theory, not a grandiose system but a specific intervention (I should add that this model of theory makes it easier to trace a direct connection to the conjunctural interventions of Balibar and Macherey). I make this connection only to make a different suggestion, a very un-Althusserian one, as I have mentioned, again and again on this blog, on social media, to random people on the street, I recently translated Franck Fischbach's La Production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza, now out in English as Marx With Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History.  One of the many merits of this book is that it argues for a connection between Spinoza's Ethics and Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In doing so it makes a case for a post or non-humanist reading of the 1844 Manuscripts. In doing so he joins Gerard Granel and, more obliquely, Deleuze and Guattari in arguing for a nonhumanist reading of that text. I will say, as something as an aside, that one of the strange things about the argument about the humanism of the young Marx is that it is rarely contested; it is more or less accepted as either a good thing, Marx is a humanist, Yay!, or a bad, thing, Marx is a humanist, Boo!. In philosophy, where everything is a Kampfplatz, and nothing is settled once and for, it seems odd that this point has remained mostly uncontested.Fischbach does not directly contest this claim about the young Marx, but transforms it through the engagement with Spinoza. Fischbach's own particular strategy of reading is to use Spinoza as an agent, a developer, to bring to light the philosophical dimension of Marx's thought. Following this we can say that if for Spinoza the formulation of humanism is to treat man as a "kingdom within a kingdom," as something that breaks rather than confirms nature's laws, then Marx's assertion in the 1844 Manuscripts that man is a part of nature is consistently Spinozist. To quote Marx,"Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."As Fischbach writes, summing up this connection."What exactly does this affirmation of man as a being of nature, as a part of nature, mean for Marx, because after all, he could or could not give these formulations a literal spinozist sense. It means first of all that man is "objective, natural, and sensuous" that is to say a finite mode amongst an infinity of other such modes. The determination of humanity as a objective being would be returned to by Marx again and again up to and including Capital, where he writes that, "the human being itself, considered as a pure existence of labor power, is a natural object, a thing, certainly living and conscious of itself, but a thing—and work properly speaking is a reification of this force." Adopting the point of view according to which the human being is first of all a being in nature, a thing in the world, is exactly to adopt the spinozist point of view according to which humans must first be grasped as a finite mode: to start, as does Spinoza, from the double fact, to know that on one hand that "man thinks" and, on the other, that "we feel that a certain body is affected in many ways," it being understood that these two traits are at the same level and of equal importance..."This is not to say that this is a simple identity, humanity is nature, Marx is Spinoza. All of these strategies of the "sive" from Spinoza's Deus sive Natura to "man is nature" are transformations as much as they are identifications. If humanity is part of nature, then that also means that nature and history are not opposed but part of the same process of transformation. As Fischbach writes, "What preserves Marx from a hypostasis of historicity is, as we have already seen, precisely his Spinozism. Because if there is a philosophy that does not know
the opposition between nature and history and which resists positing their separation, it is the philosophy of Spinoza. Not just because there is for Spinoza no real difference between nature and history, but also because with Spinoza it is difficult to even hope to understand history if one isolates it from the general order of nature. If the actors of history are certainly the peoples and states, the latter nonetheless are first and foremost made up of natural individuals, subject as such to natural necessity. If history is the history of states, and the history of a state is the history of its formation, its development, dissolution, and disappearance is made by internal dissensions and other seditions. In other words, there is for Spinoza in the Political Treatise a knowledge of nature that makes possible the understanding of history, a nature that makes history intelligible. History is made up of nothing other than the natural effort that human beings expend in order to create their collective power, to create the conditions that increase this power, and from the causes (equally natural) which contradict this effort and return human beings to their native impotence. We can therefore say, as Etienne Balibar argues, that with respect to Spinoza "nature…is nothing other than a new way of thinking about history, according to a method of rational exegesis that seeks to explain events by their causes." Historical knowledge cannot be of a different order than natural knowledge for the reason that actors of history are themselves nothing other than things in nature, parts of nature."Lastly, to add one more sive to the list, as the passage above indicates the relation of human beings to nature, of nature and history, is all because of another relation, equally important and equally overlooked, and that is humanity to society: humanity, that is society. We are nature and historical beings because we are social beings. Of course this sentence could be rewritten in multiple ways, we are social because we are natural (our needs met by society), or we historical because we are natural, and so on. Part of nature, part of history, part of society. This conception underlies one of Fischbach's most important theoretical interventions, a redefinition of alienation, not as the loss of the self, the subject in an object, but a reduction to subjectivity,"This is why we interpret Marx's concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital....Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is the loss of object for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of proper objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one's activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of humanity is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of "naked workers"—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to effective work their capacity to work."This is one merit of rereading the 1844 Manuscripts today, a new definition of alienation, one that is well suited to a world in which we are encouraged to see our existence as "kingdoms within a kingdom," separated from nature, history, and society, as our liberation and freedom. Fischbach shows how the reduction to pure subjectivity, a subject without nature, history, or society is subjection, not liberation. However, I would like to close with a different justification, that in the age of the collapse of the three ecologies, to borrow Guattari's term, natural, social, and psychic, we need to take up the problems of the 1844 Manuscripts in a nonhumanist way, to rethink what it means to be part of nature, history, and society.  This is a different sort of theoretical intervention than what Althusser called for, more philosophical, even metaphysical. 

In the last year or so there have been two books published on Althusser and Spinoza. Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop's Althusser et Spinoza: Detours et Retours and now Jean Matthys Althusser lecteur de Spinoza: Genèse et enjeux d'une éthico-politique de la théorie. This is perhaps not surprising, after all Althusser confessed to being a Spinozist famously in 1972, but I would argue that there are still some surprises to be found in terms of this combination. First, and most fundamentally, it is surprising to see two full length studies on Althusser and Spinoza since as much as the name and concepts of Spinoza played fundamental or pivotal roles in Althusser's thought, underlying his own concepts of structural, or immanent, causality, symptomatic reading, and ideology, Althusser wrote very little on Spinoza. I have often thought that the Althusser Spinoza connection exists more in its effects, in what it made possible in the writing of  Macherey and Balibar, to name just two proximate effects, rather than in Althusser's thought. Estop and Matthys both contest such an interpretation, arguing for a Spinozism that is more immanent and more consistent in Althusser's works than the few times he is mentioned by name. That is not the only surprise. As I mentioned in my review of Estop's book, it is perhaps surprising that Althusser once stated in an interview that "the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is the Capital of Spinoza, because Spinoza is preoccupied above all with history and politics." One would think that Althusser, who drew from the Ethics in terms of his theory of ideology and immanent causality, would focus more on the Ethics and Capital, two works that are systematic and complete. However, Althusser's invocation of the TTP suggests that it is less Spinoza's system than his particular intervention in a specific conjuncture that matters. To this point Matthys adds another somewhat surprising, even paradoxical consideration, that Spinoza is less a foundation of Althusser's thought than the critical destruction of any such foundation. As Matthys writes, "With respect to Althusser the principle political virtue of spinozism is found paradoxically in its radical critique of any foundation, of any purity of knowledge, and of any originary and transcendental position which supposed to guarantee political action in its course, its end and means, and to reassure its subjects of a form of self-identity in action, supported by an instance of definitive and overwhelming truth. The paradox is doubled in that, if is precisely in not founding, in not delimiting a priori a philosophical guarantee of a true politics that spinozism can produce its properly political effects, it only seems to be able to free political practice from its imaginary guarantees by investing in the most literally "dogmatic" position in the kampflatz which is the fortress of metaphysics."For Althusser Spinoza is a question of theory of its conditions and limits. Matthys argues that this not only makes it possible to read a trajectory through Althusser's thought in which the question of theoretical practice is central, but it also distinguishes Althusser from the two primary orientations to Spinoza today, a rationalist and structuralist orientation in Lordon and a vitalist and ontological orientation that can be found in Deleuze and Negri. Althusser (and to some extent Macherey and Balibar) would represent a third orientation. It might be easy to call this orientation epistemological, since it would seem to be primarily concerned with knowledge, and the division between ideology and science, but I think that misses the way in which the question of knowledge is thoroughly implicated with that of practice in the works of Althusser. Matthys uses the phrase the "ethico-political of theory" to express this third orientation. With respect to the former, the trajectory of Althusser's thought, the formulation "without origin or end" is familiar to any reader of Althusser, and he made this idea central to his understanding of not only Marx's idea of history, as a process without origin or end, but his understanding of philosophy. Origin and end remained for Althusser fundamentally theological questions taken up by philosophy, but fundamentally alien to it. As Althusser writes in Philosophy for Nonphilosophers, "Philosophy inherited this question of questions, the question of the Origin of the World, which is the question of the World, humanity and God." This is a latter text, written in the late sixties and early seventies, but published posthumously. Matthys demonstrates that the question of the origin can be found at the origin of Althusser's thought, from his early text on Hegel onward. Althusser is not so much searching for an origin, a foundation, in the sense of an archimedean point, but trying to think without origin and guarantee. Spinoza in some sense resolves the question of origin by splitting it into two. We begin at once with imagination, with our immediate knowledge, which is necessarily distorted and inadequate. This immediate knowledge is necessary ideological. However, as Matthys argues, the illusions of ideology are also allusions, they always allude to the very social conditions that they conceal and efface, which is to say that there is the condition of knowledge in our misrecognition. Or as Spinoza puts it, habemus enim ideam veram, we have a true idea. For Althusser this true idea is tied to practice, which is to say that truth must be produced from ideological conditions. We are always at once in our imaginary and ideological apprehension of the world and in our practical engagement with it. The question of knowledge is how to turn the latter against the former, to locate the orientation of a practical dimension in ideology. As Spinoza describes such a production in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, "But just as men, in the beginning, were able to make the easiest things with the tools they were born with (however laboriously and imperfectly), and once these had been made, made other, more difficult things with less labor and more perfectly, and so, proceeding gradually from the simplest works to tools, and from tools to other works and tools, reached the point where they accomplished so many and so difficult things with little labor, in the same way the intellect, by its inborn power, makes intellectual tools for itself, by which it acquires other powers ... until it reaches the pinnacle of wisdom." (This is a passage that is essential to Macherey's reading, I also write about it here)This probably won't be the cover but speaking of Spinozaand tools, Spinoza and Marx. I thought I would throw in a plug for my forthcoming book. As Matthys argues this idea of knowledge as a kind of production is what connects Marx and Spinoza. As Matthys writes, "That to read, to know, is always to produce: this is the first lesson that Althusser retains from Spinoza, projecting it to Marx and applying it to his own reading of Marx." Althusser's "symptomatic reading" is situated in between the theory of reading put forward by Spinoza in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Marx's practice of reading political economy. Matthys juxtaposes this practice of producing knowledge, a practice that always begins with its specific and determined position, with ideology that begins with the subject. Reading, the production of knowledge, what Althusser calls science, is infinitely productive, capable of new knowledge because it begins from its finite position; in contrast to this ideology is infinitely repetitive and limited because it believes that it can immediately grasp everything. Two things are most striking about Matthys book. First, even though it is exhaustive in its survey of Althusser's writing, begin with the thesis on Hegel from 1947, it is unapologetically a book about what could be considered "peak" Althusser, the period between 1965-1972 when the concepts of symptomatic reading, structural causality, theoretical practice, and ideological interpellation where developed. This is the period in which Althusser is most influenced by Spinoza, thinking through in his own way, the Spinoza/Marx conjunction. This is also the period that came under the most criticism, as ahistorical, functionalist, determinist, etc., or, in terms of Althusser's own self-criticism, as theoreticist. Theoreticism as Althusser defined is reducing all  of the demarcations between Marxism and political economy, as well as between Marx and the young Marx to a distinction between "truth and error," overlooking the social, historical, and political dimensions of Marx's transformation. This brings us to the second aspect of Matthys book, Matthys argues that what Althusser dismissed as too rational and theoretical has, at its core, a hidden ethico-political dimension. This is perhaps surprising. What does the critic of humanism have to say about ethics, that human, all too human of disciplines. Althusser's interest in Spinoza never seemed to touch on the title of his most important book. As André Tosel argued in his Du Matérialisme de Spinoza, "the Althusser of Spinoza has lost all ethico-political dimensions." It is hard to see immediately what the ethical dimension to Althusser's theoretical interventions are, and it is hard not to agree with Tosel. Tosel proves to be quite important to the final section of the book, however, not in terms of his criticism but in terms of important points of overlap between Althusser and Tosel. (Matthys is also the also the author of a great series of essays on Tosel). In some sense it is Tosel who provides the concepts to make sense of the ethical dimension of Althusser's theoretical interventions. As I have argued, here, and elsewhere, Tosel argues for a "finite communism," that is in sharp contrast to capital's dreams of endless accumulation as well as Marxist ideas of a thoroughly rational mastery of the productive forces.  Matthys argues that Althusser can be understood as a thinker of finitude. That the very idea of theoretical practice was to think the limited efficacy of theory as practice, to situate  it within other practices. As Matthys writes, "Practice in the Althusserian sense would be from this point of view analogous to the Spinozist mode, in the sense that it cannot be conceived by itself, but it can only exist, produce effect and be known in that it is articulated differently with different instances of the field." Finitude is understood here not as some particular relation to death, an all too human definition, but to be finite is to exist in and through relations with other finite things. Similarly, Althusser's famous statement about the lonely hour of the last instance is a statement about the finitude of Marxism as a theory. It will always be necessary to think the causality of the structure through its effects, to recognize the overdetermination of any essence or any essential contradiction. As Matthys writes,"Thinker of the limit, certainly, but if one prefers: a thinker of finitude. Because if Althusser tries to think the limit between marxism and its outside, between science and ideology, between materialism and idealism, it means that this line of demarcation necessarily through the heart of Marxism itself." Althusser's demarcations are not divisions accomplished once and for all, as in the epistemic break, but are produced again and again, and that finitude, that incomplete status, is precisely what makes them productive, creating new knowledge. I feel like I could go on and on about this book, but blogposts are definitely finite and limited in what they can do, so it seems necessary to conclude. The merits of Matthys book are multiple. To begin with the last, Matthys puts two of the most important Marxist philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, Althusser and Tosel, in dialogue, using one to expand the insights of the other. Second, it is a thorough study of the "Spinoza effect" in Althusser's thought, how much Althusser was transformed by his engagement with Spinoza. Spinoza cannot be reduced to the few citations in Lire le Capital and Elements of Self-Criticism, but is immanent in its effects throughout Althusser. Matthys, like Estop referred to above, as well as Morfino, Montag, Sharp, Stolze, etc. recognizes that Althusser is as much a Spinozist as a Marxist. Thus, all of Althusser's deviations of the sixties, deviations labelled "theoreticism," "structuralism," "functionalism," have to be understood as not just fidelity to Marx and Spinoza, but ultimately as conditions for new theoretical production. 

Publisher's version (útgefin grein). ; Background: Genome-wide association studies conducted on QRS duration, an electrocardiographic measurement associated with heart failure and sudden cardiac death, have led to novel biological insights into cardiac function. However, the variants identified fall predominantly in non-coding regions and their underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Results: Here, we identify putative functional coding variation associated with changes in the QRS interval duration by combining Illumina HumanExome BeadChip genotype data from 77,898 participants of European ancestry and 7695 of African descent in our discovery cohort, followed by replication in 111,874 individuals of European ancestry from the UK Biobank and deCODE cohorts. We identify ten novel loci, seven within coding regions, including ADAMTS6, significantly associated with QRS duration in gene-based analyses. ADAMTS6 encodes a secreted metalloprotease of currently unknown function. In vitro validation analysis shows that the QRS-associated variants lead to impaired ADAMTS6 secretion and loss-of function analysis in mice demonstrates a previously unappreciated role for ADAMTS6 in connexin 43 gap junction expression, which is essential for myocardial conduction. Conclusions: Our approach identifies novel coding and non-coding variants underlying ventricular depolarization and provides a possible mechanism for the ADAMTS6-associated conduction changes. ; Funding This work was funded by a grant to YJ from the British Heart Foundation (PG/12/38/29615). AGES: This study has been funded by NIH contracts N01-AG-1-2100 and 271201200022C, the NIA Intramural Research Program, Hjartavernd (the Icelandic Heart Association), and the Althingi (the Icelandic Parliament). The study is approved by the Icelandic National Bioethics Committee, VSN: 00–063. The researchers are indebted to the participants for their willingness to participate in the study. ARIC: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study is carried out as a collaborative study supported by National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute contracts (HHSN268201100005C, HHSN268201100006C, HHSN268201100007C, HHSN268201100008C, HHSN268201100009C, HHSN268201100010C, HHSN268201100011C, and HHSN268201100012C), R01HL087641, R01HL59367, and R01HL086694; National Human Genome Research Institute contract U01HG004402; and National Institutes of Health contract HHSN268200625226C. The authors thank the staff and participants of the ARIC study for their important contributions. Infrastructure was partly supported by Grant Number UL1RR025005, a component of the National Institutes of Health and NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. Funding support for "Building on GWAS for NHLBI-diseases: the U.S. CHARGE consortium" was provided by the NIH through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) (5RC2HL102419). BRIGHT: The Exome Chip genotyping was funded by Wellcome Trust Strategic Awards (083948 and 085475). This work was also supported by the Medical Research Council of Great Britain (Grant no. G9521010D); and by the British Heart Foundation (Grant no. PG/02/128). AFD was supported by the British Heart Foundation (Grant nos. RG/07/005/23633 and SP/08/005/25115); and by the European Union Ingenious HyperCare Consortium: Integrated Genomics, Clinical Research, and Care in Hypertension (grant no. LSHM-C7–2006-037093). The BRIGHT study is extremely grateful to all the patients who participated in the study and the BRIGHT nursing team. We would also like to thank the Barts Genome Centre staff for their assistance with this project. CHS: This Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS) research was supported by NHLBI contracts HHSN268201800001C, HHSN268201200036C, HHSN268200800007C, N01HC55222, N01HC85079, N01HC85080, N01HC85081, N01HC85082, N01HC85083, N01HC85086; and NHLBI grants R01HL068986, U01HL080295, R01HL087652, R01HL105756, R01HL103612, R01HL120393, and U01HL130114 with additional contribution from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Additional support was provided through R01AG023629 from the National Institute on Aging (NIA). A full list of principal CHS investigators and institutions can be found at CHS-NHLBI.org. The provision of genotyping data was supported in part by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, CTSI grant UL1TR001881, and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease Diabetes Research Center (DRC) grant DK063491 to the Southern California Diabetes Endocrinology Research Center. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. ERF: The ERF study as a part of EUROSPAN (European Special Populations Research Network) was supported by European Commission FP6 STRP grant number 018947 (LSHG-CT-2006-01947) and also received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/grant agreement HEALTH-F4–2007-201413 by the European Commission under the programme "Quality of Life and Management of the Living Resources" of 5th Framework Programme (no. QLG2-CT-2002-01254). The ERF study was further supported by ENGAGE consortium and CMSB. High-throughput analysis of the ERF data was supported by joint grant from Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (NWO-RFBR 047.017.043). We are grateful to all study participants and their relatives, general practitioners, and neurologists for their contributions to the ERF study and to P Veraart for her help in genealogy, J Vergeer for the supervision of the laboratory work, and P Snijders for his help in data collection. FHS: The Framingham Heart Study (FHS) research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), HL120393. Generation Scotland: Generation Scotland received core support from the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health Directorates (CZD/16/6) and the Scottish Funding Council (HR03006). Genotyping of the Generation Scotland and Scottish Family Health Study samples was carried out by the Genetics Core Laboratory at the Clinical Research Facility, Edinburgh, Scotland and was funded by the UK's Medical Research Council. GOCHA: The Genetics of Cerebral Hemorrhage with Anticoagulation was carried out as a collaborative study supported by grants R01NS073344, R01NS059727, and 5K23NS059774 from the NIH–National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NIH-NINDS). GRAPHIC: The GRAPHIC Study was funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF/RG/2000004). NJS and CPN are supported by the British Heart Foundation and is a NIHR Senior Investigator. This work falls under the portfolio of research supported by the NIHR Leicester Cardiovascular Biomedical Research. INGI-FVG: This study has been funded by Regione FVG (L.26.2008). INTER99: The Inter99 was initiated by Torben Jørgensen (PI), Knut Borch-Johnsen (co-PI), Hans Ibsen and Troels F. Thomsen. The steering committee comprises the former two and Charlotta Pisinger. The study was financially supported by research grants from the Danish Research Council, the Danish Centre for Health Technology Assessment, Novo Nordisk Inc., Research Foundation of Copenhagen County, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Health, the Danish Heart Foundation, the Danish Pharmaceutical Association, the Augustinus Foundation, the Ib Henriksen Foundation, the Becket Foundation, and the Danish Diabetes Association. The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research is an independent Research Center at the University of Copenhagen partially funded by an unrestricted donation from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (www.metabol.ku.dk). JHS: We thank the Jackson Heart Study (JHS) participants and staff for their contributions to this work. The JHS is supported by contracts HHSN268201300046C, HHSN268201300047C, HHSN268201300048C, HHSN268201300049C, HHSN268201300050C from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. Dr. Wilson is supported by U54GM115428 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. KORA: The KORA study was initiated and financed by the Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and by the State of Bavaria. Furthermore, KORA research was supported within the Munich Center of Health Sciences (MC-Health), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, as part of LMUinnovativ. Korcula: This work was funded by the Medical Research Council UK, The Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports (grant 216–1080315-0302), the Croatian Science Foundation (grant 8875), the Centre of Excellence in Personalized health care, and the Centre of Competencies for Integrative Treatment, Prevention and Rehabilitation using TMS. LifeLines: The LifeLines Cohort Study and generation and management of GWAS genotype data for the LifeLines Cohort Study are supported by The Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research NWO (grant 175.010.2007.006), the Economic Structure Enhancing Fund (FES) of the Dutch government, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Sports, the Northern Netherlands Collaboration of Provinces (SNN), the Province of Groningen, University Medical Center Groningen, the University of Groningen, Dutch Kidney Foundation, and Dutch Diabetes Research Foundation. Niek Verweij is supported by NWO-VENI (016.186.125) and Marie Sklodowska-Curie GF (call: H2020-MSCA-IF-2014, Project ID: 661395). UHP: Folkert W. Asselbergs is supported by UCL Hospitals NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. Ilonca Vaartjes is supported by a Dutch Heart Foundation grant DHF project "Facts and Figures." MGH-CAMP: Dr. Patrick Ellinor is funded by NIH grants (2R01HL092577, 1R01HL128914, R01HL104156, and K24HL105780) and American Heart Association Established Investigator Award 13EIA14220013 (Ellinor). Dr. Steve Lubitz is funded by NIH grants K23HL114724 and a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Scientist Development Award 2014105. NEO: The authors of the NEO study thank all individuals who participated in the Netherlands Epidemiology in Obesity study, all participating general practitioners for inviting eligible participants, and all research nurses for collection of the data. We thank the NEO study group, Pat van Beelen, Petra Noordijk, and Ingeborg de Jonge for the coordination, lab, and data management of the NEO study. We also thank Arie Maan for the analyses of the electrocardiograms. The genotyping in the NEO study was supported by the Centre National de Génotypage (Paris, France), headed by Jean-Francois Deleuze. The NEO study is supported by the participating Departments, the Division and the Board of Directors of the Leiden University Medical Center, and by the Leiden University, Research Profile Area Vascular and Regenerative Medicine. Dennis Mook-Kanamori is supported by Dutch Science Organization (ZonMW-VENI Grant 916.14.023). RS-I: The generation and management of the Illumina Exome Chip v1.0 array data for the Rotterdam Study (RS-I) was executed by the Human Genotyping Facility of the Genetic Laboratory of the Department of Internal Medicine, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The Exome chip array dataset was funded by the Genetic Laboratory of the Department of Internal Medicine, Erasmus MC, from the Netherlands Genomics Initiative (NGI)/Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)-sponsored Netherlands Consortium for Healthy Aging (NCHA; project nr. 050–060-810); the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO; project number 184021007); and by the Rainbow Project (RP10; Netherlands Exome Chip Project) of the Biobanking and Biomolecular Research Infrastructure Netherlands (BBMRI-NL; www.bbmri.nl). We thank Ms. Mila Jhamai, Ms. Sarah Higgins, and Mr. Marijn Verkerk for their help in creating the exome chip database, and Carolina Medina-Gomez, MSc, Lennard Karsten, MSc, and Linda Broer PhD for QC and variant calling. Variants were called using the best practice protocol developed by Grove et al. as part of the CHARGE consortium exome chip central calling effort. The Rotterdam Study is funded by Erasmus Medical Center and Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands Organization for the Health Research and Development (ZonMw), the Research Institute for Diseases in the Elderly (RIDE), the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Sports, the European Commission (DG XII), and the Municipality of Rotterdam. The authors are grateful to the study participants, the staff from the Rotterdam Study, and the participating general practitioners and pharmacists. The work of Bruno H. Stricker is supported by grants from the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) (Priority Medicines Elderly 113102005 to ME and DoelmatigheidsOnderzoek 80–82500–98-10208 to BHS). The work of Mark Eijgelsheim is supported by grants from the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) (Priority Medicines Elderly 113102005 to ME and DoelmatigheidsOnderzoek 80–82500–98-10208 to BHS). SHIP: SHIP is supported by the BMBF (grants 01ZZ9603, 01ZZ0103, and 01ZZ0403) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG]; grant GR 1912/5–1). SHIP and SHIP-TREND are part of the Community Medicine Research net (CMR) of the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University Greifswald (EMAU) which is funded by the BMBF as well as the Ministry for Education, Science and Culture and the Ministry of Labor, Equal Opportunities, and Social Affairs of the Federal State of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. The CMR encompasses several research projects that share data from SHIP. The EMAU is a member of the Center of Knowledge Interchange (CKI) program of the Siemens AG. SNP typing of SHIP and SHIP-TREND using the Illumina Infinium HumanExome BeadChip (version v1.0) was supported by the BMBF (grant 03Z1CN22). We thank all SHIP and SHIP-TREND participants and staff members as well as the genotyping staff involved in the generation of the SNP data. TWINSUK: TwinsUK is funded by the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council, European Union, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)-funded BioResource, Clinical Research Facility and Biomedical Research Centre based at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust in partnership with King's College London. UKBB: This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource (application 8256 - Understanding genetic influences in the response of the cardiac electrical system to exercise) and is supported by Medical Research Council grant MR/N025083/1. We also wish to acknowledge the support of the NIHR Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit at Barts and Queen Mary University of London, UK. PD Lambiase acknowledges support from the UCLH Biomedicine NIHR. MO is supported by an IEF 2013 Marie Curie fellowship. JR acknowledges support from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under REA grant agreement no. 608765. YFS: The Young Finns Study has been financially supported by the Academy of Finland: grants 286284, 134309 (Eye), 126925, 121584, 124282, 129378 (Salve), 117787 (Gendi), and 41071 (Skidi); the Social Insurance Institution of Finland; Competitive State Research Financing of the Expert Responsibility area of Kuopio, Tampere and Turku University Hospitals (grant X51001); Juho Vainio Foundation; Paavo Nurmi Foundation; Finnish Foundation for Cardiovascular Research; Finnish Cultural Foundation; Tampere Tuberculosis Foundation; Emil Aaltonen Foundation; Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation; Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation; and Diabetes Research Foundation of Finnish Diabetes Association. The expert technical assistance in the statistical analyses by Irina Lisinen is gratefully acknowledged. Cell culture and biochemistry: Funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health (Program of Excellence in Glycoscience award HL107147 to SSA and F32AR063548 to TJM) and the David and Lindsay Morgenthaler Postdoctoral Fellowship (to TJM) and by the Allen Distinguished Investigator Program, through support made by The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group and the American Heart Association (to SSA). Mutant mouse model: Adamts6 mutant mice were generated and further propagated and analyzed by funding provided by NIH grants HL098180 and HL132024 (to CWL) and by the Allen Distinguished Investigator Program, through support made by The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group and the American Heart Association (to SSA). ; Peer Reviewed

A partire dagli anni Novanta, il Postumanesimo è entrato in maniera crescente nella discussione accademica, riflettendo l'esigenza contemporanea di una riformulazione della prospettiva filosofica in grado di interloquire e interagire teoreticamente con gli sviluppi onto-epistemologici, oltreché scientifici e bio-tecnologici, del XX° e del XXI° secolo. In questo scenario mutato, "postumano" e "transumano" sono divenuti termini di ricerca filosofica, scientifica e, più in generale, esistenziale. Il panorama filosofico che si è andato sviluppando in maniera molteplice e a tutt'oggi in divenire, per far fronte alla ridefinizione del concetto di "umano", comprende diverse scuole di pensiero, i cui sviluppi teoretici sono divergenti e non assimilabili. L'etichetta "postumano" viene spesso evocata in maniera generica e pluri-comprensiva per indicare questi diversi punti di vista, creando confusione metodologica e teoretica nella discussione sia accademica che mediatica. In altre parole, "postumano" è diventato un termine-ombrello che include il Postumanesimo Filosofico, Critico e Culturale; il Transumanesimo (nelle sue varianti in quanto: Estropico, Liberale e Democratico, tra le altre correnti); i Nuovi Materialismi (uno sviluppo postumano di matrice specificamente femminista); il frastagliato panorama dell'Antiumanesimo; le Postumanità e le Metaumanità. Al momento manca uno studio che ponga chiarezza sulle somiglianze e differenze tra i vari termini e scuole di pensiero; sulle loro specifiche genealogie, analogie, e talvolta, sovrapposizioni. Questa tesi tenta, da un lato, di colmare tale vuoto; dall'altro, vuole apportare un contributo critico e teoretico alla discussione postumana, situandosi specificamente nel Postumanesimo Filosofico. Parte 1 Storico-Teoretica La tesi è suddivisa in due parti. La prima parte, più strettamente storico-teoretica, si sviluppa attorno a tre nodi tematici, individuati nelle domande: Cosa è il Postumanesimo Filosofico? Quando e come l'Essere Umano è diventato Umano? Siamo sempre stati/e Postumane/i? Le tre domande non costituiscono nette suddivisioni discorsive, ma sono da considerarsi come spunti e suggestioni che informano lo svilupparsi del discorso. Alla prima domanda, corrisponde una riflessione storica sul Postumanesimo Filosofico, riconosciuto in quanto filosofia in fieri, sviluppo recente del Postumanesimo Critico e Culturale, a sua volta locato nella Critica Letteraria, a partire dalla coniazione del termine (Hassan 1987), fino ad arrivare agli Anni Novanta e alla pubblicazione del testo-chiave "How We Became Posthuman" (1999) di Katherine Hayles. Negli Anni Novanta si può anche individuare il formarsi di una riflessione più strettamente filosofica del Postumanesimo, che si andrà sviluppando dalla prima decade del XXI° secolo fino ad oggi, e la cui genealogia, tracciata a partire dalla "Lettera sull'Umanesimo" di Martin Heidegger (1947), passa attraverso il Postmodernismo, gli Studi delle Differenze (sessuali, etnico-razziali, di genere, classe, età, abilità fisica, etc.) e la Teoria Cyborg. Proprio attraverso il cyborg, specificamente situato nella riflessione critica di Donna Haraway (1985), il Postumanesimo interiorizza l'ibrido come l'origine che non ha origine. Il Postumanesimo è una filosofia della mediazione, post-dualistica, post-centralizzante, inclusiva e comprensiva. Da un lato, si pone, in quanto "post-umanesimo", come una critica radicale all'umanesimo e all'antropocentrismo; dall'altro, nella sua significazione di "postuman-esimo", riconosce quegli aspetti che sono costitutivamente umani, e ciononostante, oltre i limiti costitutivi dell'umano in senso stretto. Il Postumanesimo apre a diversi tipi di conoscenza, offrendo un invito a un pensare teoretico inclusivo, che posizioni genealogicamente l'umanità all'interno della multiversalità, e contemporaneamente, l'alterità dentro il sé. La differenza è il cuore del Postumanesimo: non può essere cancellata nella sua prassi, senza allo stesso tempo minare l'identità teorica dell'approccio postumano prospettivista, che viene tracciato, da un lato, attraverso la proposta di Friedrich Nietzsche (1887; 19061), dall'altro, attraverso il significato biologico della nozione di "autopoiesi" (Maturana / Varela 1972). È importante notare come la prospettiva non gerarchica del postumano, che include la possibilità del punto di vista dell'animale non-umano (Wolfe 2010), dell'intelligenza artificiale e della robotica, fino a forme di vita sconosciute, sia radicata nel riconoscimento che la differenza è già incorporata nella specie umana, con tutti i suoi generi, etnie, varietà sociali, individuali etc. Il Postumanesimo si può considerare un Postmodernismo di seconda generazione, che porta alle estreme conseguenze la decostruzione dell'umano, apportando all'interno della rivisitazione teoretica lo specismo, ossia, il privilegio di alcune specie rispetto ad altre – nel caso specifico, il privilegio riconosciuto all'essere umano dall'essere umano, rispetto a tutte le altre forme di esistenza. La apertura onto-epistemologica del Potumanesimo si colloca in una visione ibrida dell'umano stesso. In questo senso si affronta la seconda domanda, e cioè: quando e come l'essere umano è diventato umano? Nella storia occidentale, il concetto di "umano" è stato reinscritto all'interno di categorie segnate da pratiche esclusiviste. Il sessismo, il razzismo, il classismo, il geriatrismo, l'omofobia e l'abilismo, accanto ad altre forme discriminatorie, hanno informato il paradigma riconoscitivo rispetto a chi considerare umano/a. In questa tesi, viene enfatizzato come il Postumanesimo Filosofico abbia origine nella decostruzione radicale dell' "umano" che, iniziata come una causa politica negli anni Sessanta e tramutatasi in un progetto accademico negli anni Settanta, si è evoluta in un approccio epistemologico negli anni Novanta, producendo una moltiplicazione di prospettive, e riproponendo l'umano in quanto nozione processuale, molteplice, nomade, in divenire. In questo senso, il Postumanesimo è inevitabilmente indebitato con gli Studi di Genere, i Critical Race Studies, la Teoria Queer, gli Studi Postcoloniali, gli Studi sulla Disabilità, e, in generale, lo studio delle differenze (slegate da una norma costitutiva). Questa rivisitazione dell'umano storico viene affrontata anche a livello linguistico e tassonomico, per comprendere se l'esclusivismo che ha caratterizzato i risultati del processo di umanizzazione – concepito come verbo, "umanizzare", più che come "macchina antropologica" (Agamben 2002) –, sia interconnesso ai meccanismi semantici che sostengono il termine "umano", investigato nel suo etimo latino (humanitas), e nella sua classificazione tassonomica in quanto Homo sapiens. Questa investigazione risulta funzionale al fine di riflettere sulla rilevanza di postulare un "post" alla nozione di umano. Da un lato, il post-umano deve essere consapevole della sua relazione genealogica rispetto all'umano, e approfondire il significato di ciò che questo comporta. 1Si fa qui riferimento alla seconda edizione di "La Volontà di Potenza", la cui prima pubblicazione apparve, postuma, nel 1901. D'altro lato, il postumanesimo manifesta con successo il suo impegno critico e stabilisce il suo approccio attraverso le condizioni del "post" (al posto di altri prefissi, quali "trans" e "anti"). Il Postumanesimo viene dunque confrontato con altre correnti di pensiero, in particolare il Transumanesimo e l'Antiumanesimo. Mentre il Postumanesimo nasce dal Postmodernismo, il Transumanesimo cerca le proprie origini nell'Illuminismo, e quindi non espropria l'umanesimo, al contrario, può essere definito come un ultra-umanesimo. È importante notare che il Transumanesimo ospita al suo interno varie correnti che, pur condividendone le linee teoriche, differiscono su punti determinati; verranno interpellate alcune delle principali voci dell'Estropianesimo (More 1990; 1998) (Vita-More 2004), del Transumanesimo Democratico (Hughes 2004), e della Singolarità (Kurzweil 2005). Al fine di potenziare le capacità umane, il Transumanesimo opta per una trasformazione radicale della condizione umana attuale, attraverso tecnologie emergenti e speculative (come nel caso della medicina rigenerativa, l'estensione radicale della vita, l'uploading e la crionica), suggerendo che la diversità e la molteplicità andranno a sostituire la nozione di esistenza umana all'interno di un unico sistema, come è il corpo biologico. Per il Transumanesimo, gli esseri umani potranno eventualmente trasformarsi così radicalmente da diventare postumani/e (il concetto di postumano stesso è interpretato in un'accezione specificamente transumanista). Se la forza della visione transumana consiste nell'apertura rispetto alle possibilità offerte dalla scienza e dalla tecnologia, in questo stesso aspetto, si fonda la sua debolezza, che può essere individuata in una assimilazione tecno-riduzionista dell'esistente, e in una linearità progressivista che non concede spazio a pratiche decostruzioniste. Se la razionalità moderna e il progresso sono al centro della postulazione del transumano, una critica radicale di queste stesse nozioni è al cuore dell'Antiumanesimo, una posizione filosofica che, pur condividendo le sue radici nella postmodernità con il Postumanesimo, non deve essere equiparata ad esso. La decostruzione dell'umano, che è quasi assente nella riflessione del Transumanesimo, è fondamentale per l'Antiumanesimo. Questo è uno dei suoi punti in comune con il Postumanesimo, mentre la loro distinzione principale è già incorporata nelle morfologie, e specificamente, nella loro composizione: l'opposizione strutturale implicita nel prefisso "anti-" è contestata dall'orizzonte post-dualistico ontologico-processuale del "post-". Il Postumanesimo è consapevole del fatto che presunzioni umanistiche e gerarchiche non sono facilmente individuabili. In questo senso, più che con la "morte dell'Uomo" di Michel Foucault (1966), che è uno dei principali punti di partenza di una certa riflessione antiumanista, il postumano è in sintonia con l'approccio decostruzionista di Jacques Derrida (1967). In questa sezione, l'Übermensch di Friedrich Nietzsche (1882; 1883-5) viene messo in relazione, sotto prospettive differenti, sia al Post-, che al Trans-, che all'Anti-Umanesimo. Un aspetto che accomuna lo scenario postumano (qui inteso in senso esteso), è il suo interesse nel riflettere sulle potenzialità offerte alla nozione di "umano", dagli sviluppi tecnologici. Nel Transumanesimo, tale focus è fortemente centralizzante e strumentale; la tecnologia si risolve come mezzo e fine per l'ottenimento di specifici traguardi: a partire da tecnologie sempre più avanzate, fino ad arrivare all'immortalità, ridefinita come estensione radicale della vita. Il Postumanesimo Filosofico, passando attraverso "La questione della Tecnica" (1953) di Martin Heidegger, indaga la tecnologia come una modalità di disvelamento, e ri-accede in questo modo alle sue potenzialità ontologiche ed esistenziali; la nozione di tecnologie del sé (Foucault 1988)2 diventa significativa in un panorama che ha decostruito il dualismo sé / altro, attraverso un'ontologia relazionale. In questo senso, l'essere umano non è percepito come agente autonomo, ma come parte di un network semiotico e materiale (Latour 1987; 2005), oltreché multidimensionale. Ogni manifestazione dell'esistenza, in questo quadro descrittivo, viene percepita come nodo del divenire, operante tecnologia del multiverso. La nozione di multiverso si riferisce alle indagini scientifiche dal micro al macro livello della materia, indagini che, a partire dagli anni Settanta, hanno portato diversi campi di investigazione (dalla Fisica Quantistica alla Cosmologia e all'Astrofisica), alla stessa conclusione ipotetica: questo universo potrebbe essere uno fra tanti. Nonostante la indubbia portata generativa di tale conclusione, l'ipotesi del multiverso è stata per lo più sviluppata in termini che ricalcano prospettive umano-centriche e solipsistiche, sia a livello scientifico (Tegmark 2010), che filosofico – in particolare, nel realismo modale (Lewis 1986). L'ipotesi fisica del multiverso viene rivisitata attraverso il rizoma (Deleuze / Guattari 1987), in una originale acquisizione di senso del multiverso, nozione che si rivela induttiva per un'ontologia postumana monisticamente pluralistica e pluristicamente monista, che ha decostruito il dualismo strutturale Uno/Infinito. In questo senso, viene affrontato il terzo nodo tematico, legato alla domanda: siamo sempre stati/e postumane/i? A questo fine, viene indagato il campo della biologia, i relativi concetti di vita e di evoluzione, e le modalità di ri-accedervi del Postumanesimo, attraverso lo scioglimento di dualismi frontali quali vita/morte, organico/artificiale, animato/inanimato, in una rivisitazione trasversale della materia – in particolare, attraverso la Fisica Quantistica e la Teoria delle Stringhe – indagata attraverso la prospettiva dei Nuovi Materialismi, nella riflessione di Rosi Braidotti, (2002; 2006), Jane Bennett (2010), e Karen Barad (2007). 2Poco prima di morire, nel 1984, Foucault esternò la sua intenzione di lavorare a un libro sulle tecnologie del sé. Nel 1988, il testo "Tecnologie del Sé: un Seminario con Michel Foucault" è stato pubblicato post-mortem, sulla base di un seminario che Foucault aveva presentato presso l'Università del Vermont nel 1982. Parte 2. Empirico-Sperimentale Nella Parte 2, presenterò i risultati empirici della ricerca che ho condotto con il Prof. Kevin Warwick – noto per gli esperimenti "Cyborg I" (1998) e "Cyborg II" (2002) –, presso il Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università di Reading (Inghilterra), Ottobre 2010 / Gennaio 2011. Un questionario pensato attraverso l'Epistemologia Femminista è stato compilato da più di cento studenti/esse, rilevando questioni cruciali sul ruolo di genere ed etnia nella produzione dell'Intelligenza Artificiale. Le domande teoriche che mi hanno spinto ad investigare questo territorio sperimentale, ibrido, tra la filosofia, la sociologia e le tecno-scienze, possono essere cosí presentate: come viene concepito il cyborg, a livello onto-epistemologico, dal contemporaneo pensiero scientifico? Come maschile? Femminile? Transgender? Rivelare la Weltanschauung di giovani studiosi e studiose della Cibernetica diventa fondamentale per contemplare le possibilità del cyborg, affinché questo non si riveli in un nuovo dualismo, come quello, già contemplato nella letteratura fantascientifica, dell'umano "vero" versus cyborg, che presenta l'intelligenza artificiale come il nuovo "altro", lo specchio differenziale (Irigaray 1974), attraverso cui riaffermare l'umano. Il rischio che tale vuoto simbolico venga assegnato all'automa esiste, in particolare se il progresso della scienza perseguirà strade legate a pratiche storicamente esclusiviste. Nella prospettiva postumana, il valore differenziale della robotica viene interpretato in un'ottica di complementarità. Il fatto che nell'automa si vada sviluppando un tipo di intelligenza diversa rispetto a quella umana, non viene giudicato attraverso l'ottica antropocentrica e dualista (basata sulla dicotomia cartesiana corpo/mente) tipica dei padri dell'Intelligenza Artificiale, secondo cui il modello di intelligenza per eccellenza è quello umano (Minsky 1985: Moravec 1988). Il Postumanesimo dismette la necessità della costituzione simbolica dell'altro/a – che ha storicamente tracciato l'umano, e che oggi si riadotta nella rappresentazione dell'intelligenza artificiale –, in quanto inefficiente, fondata su un confronto esclusivista e settoriale. Il Postumanesimo riconosce il potenziale delle differenze in un'ottica integrata, come estensione di possibilità. Riflettere a livello teoretico sulla costituzione onto-epistemologica del cyborg ha una portata non solo filosofica, ma socio-politica. Questa parte della tesi enfatizza la rivisitazione femminista della tecnologia e della scienza, e più in generale, il contributo del pensiero della differenza nell'interpretazione della moltiplicazione delle differenze attraverso gli sviluppi della robotica e dell'intelligenza artificiale, per far sì che l'inclusivismo situato del pensiero postumano si adoperi in questa storica riformulazione dell'esistente, da cui si generano future ontologie. Conclusioni Questa tesi si propone, da un lato, di chiarire il confuso scenario del postumano; dall'altro, sviluppa la riflessione sul Postumanesimo Filosofico, chiarendo innanzitutto la necessità di stabilire un "post" alla storia esclusivista e gerarchizzata dell'antropocentrismo. Pur consapevole delle proprie limitazioni epistemiche (in quanto teorizzato da e per esseri umani), il Postumanesimo, decentrando l'umano, apre a diversi tipi di conoscenza e comprensione, offrendo un invito a un pensare teoretico inclusivo, che posizioni genealogicamente l'umanità all'interno del multiverso, e contemporaneamente l'alterità dentro il sé. La riflessione sulle possibilità aperte dal Postumanesimo svela la sua carica politica e rievoca l'agency come partecipazione del soggetto situato nella visualizzazione di futuri desiderabili, includendo la bioetica, ma non risolvendosi in essa; il suo campo investigativo include i Futures Studies (la nozione di "futuro" è da intendersi in senso non-lineare). Una volta che l'essere umano, e più in generale, l'esistente, vengono riconosciuti in quanto network semiotici, materiali, e multiversali, immaginare modi di esistenza postumana diventa un processo di significazione che eccede ogni singolo agente, un'intra-attività relazionale non dualisticamente scissa da manifestazioni ontiche. Il Postumanesimo è una prassi: il "cosa" del suo pensiero è necessariamente connesso al "come". Pensare in un'ottica pluralistica, radicata in un ampio resoconto critico di ciò che significa essere umani/e, offre al soggetto storico contemporaneo la capacità di relazionarsi, non solo, all'estrema apertura di possibilità contemplate attraverso gli sviluppi della scienza e della tecnologia, ma anche, al potenziale connesso alle tecnologie evolutive della materia e del divenire, presentandosi come un percorso esistenziale alla scoperta del sé, una volta che il sé è stato riconosciuto in quanto alterità. Queste sono le ragioni per cui, nell'ambito del pensiero contemporaneo, ritengo il Postumanesimo Filosofico come l'approccio più fluido e flessibile per riflettere sul presente, sul passato, e su futuri possibili, sviscerando, da un lato, i significati e le potenzialità di un passaggio onto-epistemologico dall'umano al postumano; dall'altro, rilevando l'importanza della decostruzione filosofica, politica e sociale dell'umano, affinché il Postumanesimo possa sviluppare modalità inclusive, mediate e comprensive, ma allo stesso tempo situate. Il Postumanesimo deve radicarsi in un ampio resoconto critico di ciò che significa essere umane/i, offrendo un terminus a quo strategico da cui immaginare prossime postumanità che mettano in discussione il tradizionale discorso del potere "neutro", e si rivelino inclusive per un crescente numero di soggettività situate. Questa tesi vuole offrire lo spazio teorico per una visualizzazione critica e pluralisticamente desiderabile di futuri postumani, scardinando la necessità della costituzione simbolica dell'altro/a, e riconoscendo che l'essere umano, in quanto ontologicamente differenziale e relazionale, oltreché costantemente in evoluzione, è sempre stato postumano.

25 páginas, 6 figuras, 2 tablas ; Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele. ; This work was funded by a grant (EADB) from the EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research. INSERM UMR1167 is also funded by the INSERM, Institut Pasteur de Lille, Lille Métropole Communauté Urbaine and French government's LABEX DISTALZ program (development of innovative strategies for a transdisciplinary approach to AD). Full consortium acknowledgements and funding are in the Supplementary Not ; Peer reviewed

Rosa Ricci Summary of the PHD Dissertation: Religious Nonconformity and cultural Dynamics: The Case of the Dutch Collegiants There is ample reason to engage in research around the Collegiants, a minority religious movement in the Netherlands of the 17th century. An exploration of this topic can be interesting not only for a contribution to the history of Religion but also to understand the development of some central concept in the early modernity. Prominent, in this research, is the question that initially stirred my personal interest in the Collegiantism; i.e. to define and understand the religious and cultural background that represents the practical field of confrontation of Baruch Spinoza\''s philosophy. This historiographical question had the purpose of highlighting the relationship between Spinoza and the religious movements of his time in order to fully understand the public to whom he addressed his texts. Collegiants, however, constitute an interesting field of research not only for the study of Spinoza, but widely to understand the cultural and social dynamic of the Dutch Golden Age, a backdrop against which emerged a new idea of religion. This dissertation is not exploring a curiosity or an inconsistent exception in the history of the 17th century, but rather the centrality of a group that was influenced by and largely influenced its Dutch social, political and religious context. One of the major problems in capturing the significance of the Collegiants arises from the difficulty in defining this movement, which chose never to formulate a confession of faith and consciously refused to be classified within a specific Church, sect, or congregation. The name, Collegiants, was not the consequence of an active choice but a label that arose, together with that of Rijnsburgers, in the polemic pamphlets of the epoch. The difficulties to define such elusive religious group make, however, the Collegiants a fascinating field of research. In this dissertation the Collegaints are termed a "movement" in order to emphasize their explicit lacks of norms or model and to highlight the continual change and redefinition of their religious identity. This process can be properly defined using Deleuze\''s concept of becoming minorities: Les minorités et les majorités ne se distinguent pas par le nombre. Une minorité peut être plus nombreuse qu\''une majorité. Ce qui définit la majorité, c\''est un modèle auquel il faut être conforme [.] Tandis qu\''une minorité n\''a pas de modèle, c\''est un devenir, un processus [.] Quand une minorité se crée des modèles, c\''est parce qu\''elle veut devenir majoritaire, et c\''est sans doute inévitable pour sa survie ou son salut. This definition can help us to see both the positive and the productive side of the Collegiant movement, even thought it defined itself negatively in order to protest against the institutional Church and normative religion. The Collegiants were involved in this process of "devenir minoritaire" in a highly conscious way. They decided willfully to avoid strict affiliation to Churches or congregations and criticized explicitly the necessity of an identitarian definition. It can hardly be denied, indeed, that the religious reflection of the Collegiants was characterized by the conscientious refusal to construct a model or a norm to which they could refer. In this dissertation the term "minority" will therefore be used, always in reference to this concept, without drawing too much stress to the effective number of the Collegiants\'' members. This question appear, indeed, misleading because it does not take into account the position that Collegiants\'' member occupied in the economic, political and intellectual life of the United Provinces. It is the case of a group which, indeed, demonstrated in several occasions its deep influence in the Dutch religious life. Collegiants\'' continuous efforts towards de-institutionalization and their aspiration to an egalitarian and democratic religious life have to be conceived as an invitation to their coeval confessions, to undertake the way of evolving minorities renouncing whichever exclusivity and authority. The articulation of the Collegiants\'' proposal can be appreciated by studying the different lines of thought that emerged clearly from their texts. Most of Collegiants\'' publications were polemical or written to answer specific accusations. Within the enormous number of sources that can be included in Collegiants\'' works emerge a limited number of arguments. The question of religious organization, tolerance, freedom of speech and the epistemological approach in reading the Scriptures; these arguments can be taken as guidelines to understanding and defining the nature of the movement. These sources present arguments and concepts that we can take to be the Collegiants\'' stance on religious life and belief. Some arguments, however, emerged with particularly force because of the sanction of the Church orthodoxy. Tolerance, free-prophecy and egalitarian and anti-authoritarian tendencies were sensitive points to which the Church or Congregations reacted with particularly vehemence, sensing a threat to their institutional power. The Chapter 5 of this dissertation are dedicated to the enumeration of these arguments. Each chapter presents a specific theoretical core and question. However the chapters are not self-conclusive because the various problematics encountered in the study of Collegiants overlap each other in continuous cross-reference and this gives rise to a kaleidoscopic effect. The concepts debated in this dissertation can be fully understood only in relation to each other, as they emerge to construct a semantic constellation useful to their contextualization. Each chapter, furthermore, comes to focus on one or more texts that are considered exemplary or representative of a particular tendency in the Collegiants´history. This methodology wants to underline how the constant redefinition of the Collegiants\'' identity is always a matter of personal as well as collective choice, of internal debate and external polemic. An emphasis on the intentionality of Collegiants\'' behaviour is particularly important in understanding which specific choice they made to contrast the authoritarian and exclusive vision of the religious life. These choices are well reflected in the use of a specific vocabulary and in the emergence of specific concepts that can be considered as key guideline to identifying some stable points in the shifting nature of the Collegiants. The first chapter of this dissertation delineates an initial general history of the movement together with the ground on which the Collegiants built their vision of belief: the question about Church organization. The chapter refers directly to the practical organization of the Collegiant movement, an egalitarian and anti-charismatic religious life which involved considerations of power and identity. This specific position, with its high level of nonexclusivity and anticharismatic consciousness, makes Collegiants movement an exception in the pluralist world of 17th century Holland and marked their difference to the constellation of Dutch reformation. Although some Collegiants\'' demeanor mirrored the progressive individualization of cults and beliefs, they accorded central importance to the community, the context in which their religious ideal of confrontation and discussion was realized. The first attempt to write an exhaustive history of the rise and development of the Rijnsburgers was made by a Remonstrant preacher, Paschier de Fijne. He was the first opponent of the Collegiants; his book, Kort, waerachtigh, en getrouw Varhael van het eerste Begin en Opkomen van de Nieuwe Sekte der Propheten ofte Rynsburgers in het dorp Warmont anno 1619 en 1620 (Brief, truthful, and faithful history of the beginning and origin of the new sect of the Prophet of Rijnsburg in the village of Warmont), published anonymously in 1671 by his son, expresses his critical position vis à vis the Rijnsburgers. Besides representing the first opposition to the Collegiants, this work constitutes an important source because the author attended the first Collegiant\'' assembly (the Rijnsburgers\'' vergadering). In particular it describes the way in which this first meeting took place. For the first complete history of the Collegiant movement, however, we have to wait until 1775 when the Histoire der Rijnburgsche Vergadering (History of Rijnsburg\''s assembly), written by the Collegiant Elias van Nijmegen, appeared in Rotterdam. Both these sources are key instruments for reconstructing and understanding how Collegiants organized their assemblies, and how they achieved an acharismatic meeting, through debate and free-exegesis. These testimonies, which embrace a whole century, have, however, the demerit of representing the Collegiant\'' vergadering (assembly) as an eccentric but defined ritual. What emerges, on the other hand, from Collegiants internal debate is that the conduct of the meeting supper, the organization of religious life, the definition of free-exegesis and the limitation of free speech were all subject to constant argument and discussion inside the movement. These concerns emerge in a fragmentary way in the manifold sources that discuss the nature of free-prophecy, tolerance and ecclesiology. In the polemic with Bredenburg, the Bredenburgse twisten, the debate about tolerance involved the discussion of women's role in the vergadering and the reflections on free-prophecy indirectly interrogate the charismatic nature of the organization. Another important characteristic of the Collegiant\'' movement, delineate in the first chapter, is the autonomous and independent development of the single collegia. City autonomy and the different religious and social contexts in which the Rijnsburger vergadering took root led to large-scale differentiation. The capacity of Collegiants to survive for more than a century with their refusal of normativity and authoritarian organization was substantially due to the penetration of the Collegiants\'' arguments into the different confessions. This deep influence, in particular in the Mennonite and Remonstrant communities, defined the nature of the Collegiants, especially in some cities, as a stream inside institutionalized Churches. Because the collegia were open to all Christians, without limitation, even including Socinians and Catholics, most of the participants were also members of structured Churches, congregations or sects. In Amsterdam this phenomenon was particularly evident and the penetration of Collegiants\'' argument in the Flemish community through Galenus Abrahamsz led to one of the most important schisms in the Mennonite history in the United Provinces. In other cities such as Leiden or Haarlem, the existence of cultural circles and other forms of nonreligious association constituted the basis for the spread of Collegiantism. It was only in Rijnsburg, the village in which the movement first emerged, that a common house was built, after 1640, to host the twice yearly Collegiant national vergadering. The practical organization of the Collegiants, as has been stated, represents the foundation on which noncharismatic ecclesiology and anticonfessional ideals were constructed. With the historical background of the first chapter it is then possible to discuss the main religious and political tendencies inside the movement. The second chapter of this dissertation, following the issue of religious organization discussed in the first chapter, deals with the principles of free-prophecy, Biblical exegesis, and Collegiants ecclesiology. The central concept examined in this chapter is nonconformity analysed in its historical development of England and the Netherlands. This chapter suggests that nonconformity as religious phenomenon was an elaboration and transformation of the anti-confessional and anti-clerical thought that emerged in the 16th century with the radical Reformation. The inception of nonconformity in the Netherlands is indicated by the transformation of the debate about Nicodemism, following Coornhert\''s defense of religious dissimulation and indifferentism. Nicodemism was indeed considered, in the early 16th century, as necessary behavior to avoid pointless martyrdom and persecution, utilized especially by the crypto-reformed in Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain. The diffusion of this conduct among Catholics in reformed countries but, principally, the diffusion and justification of Nicodemism in the United Provinces, where inquisitorial control and confessional repression presented a relative risk after the revolt against Spain, testify of the new meaning that this behaviour took on in the late 16th century. Nicodemism, as Coornhert\''s position shows, became the justification of anticonfessionalism as conscious behaviour, with the possibility of openly criticizing rituals and ceremonies as for achieving salvation. In this chapter particular attention is paid to the consciousness and the open dimension of this behavior. The neglect of dissimulation and the necessity of making public personal religious sentiments, is one of the basic elements in the change between Nicodemism and nonconformity. The nonconformists acquired the anticonfessional and anticlerical content of Nicodemism, but added a principal characteristic: the veridiction. The veridiction represents the necessity of telling the truth about personal belief and religious conscience, but also institutes the core of reality in the conformity between internal belief and external behavior. These elements were present in both English and Dutch nonconformity, which developed, however, into different and sometimes opposite ecclesiology. In the English case, external nonconformity to the dominant Church and the necessity of openly showing belief led to a demand for exclusivity and a process of individualization rooted in the juridical meaning of nonconformity. Despite the turning of the debate around the necessity of free-conscience, the understanding of nonconformity as a refusal of secular world and the attempt of Baxter to disconnect the debate around nonconformity to a juridical question, the English debate never developed into a criticism of the Church\''s organization or in the necessity of a democratization of the religious life, which was, on the contrary, dominant among the Collegiants. The central text in the history of Collegiantism and in the Dutch definition of nonconformity is Galenus Abrahamsz and David Spruyt\''s XIX Artikelen. This text was conceived, from the very beginning, as a collective discussion about the nature and the sense of a religious community in the absence of Holy Gifts. Collegiants give to the term nonconformity a specific meaning which designates the absence of conformity to the first apostolic Church and the end of the extraordinaries gifts of the Holy Spirit. This radical statement caused a reaction among the orthodox members of the Mennonites and Quakers, which see in the absence of Holy inspiration a complete secularization of the religious community. Nonconformity assumed therefore for the Collegiants a double meaning: on one side it was an elaboration of anticonfessional criticism through the statement of the absence of holy influence on the religious life, on another side it represented a deep criticism of priestly authority conceived as a secularized power acting as constraint of consciences. The absence of Holy Gifts was, for the Collegiants, the demonstration that no Church or Congregation could pretend to be the true or original one. The reaction of Dutch orthodoxy appears, indeed, completely justified, because Collegiants\'' religious nonconformity presents itself not only as conscious antiauthoritarian criticism but also as a statement of the full secularization of the Church. Nonconformity was, for Abrahamsz and Spruyt, not only an unavoidable state, but also a necessary behavior to unmask the inauthentic religious life. This position represented the core of Collegiants\'' practice, the reason for their continuous redefinition and, on the same level, for their refusal of any type of identification. The recognition of the secularized status of common religious life arose among the Collegiants accompanied by an ample debate about free-prophecy and Bible exegesis, stressing the possibility of an individual form of salvation. A central role, in this direction, was played by reflection on the veridiction as a form of conformity between the inward conscience and the external behavior. Although there emerged from the sources a controversial statement about how to approach and read the Scriptures, through the free-prophecy the Collegiants organized a form of collective exegesis that had its principal aim to avoid charismatic and authoritarian leadership but also to realize a form of community close to the first apostolic Church. The communitarian discussion also involved a debate on salvation, which had no more to be tied to the simple membership in a confession but developed as an articulated discussion on the significance of the ethical and religious life. A good Christian had to reinterpret and bring alive the first teaching of the Gospel, which can be summarized as love for others and in the propagation of tolerance as ethical and interpersonal behavior. Collegiants\'' reflections on religious life, organization of communities, and their continuous effort to maintain equal relations in the absence of charismatic gifts in the Church institution, never turn to consideration of society or political forms. This absence was even more significant in a cultural and social context in which theological questions involved directly or indirectly political questions. In the same period, furthermore, Hobbes\'' reflections on jusnaturalism challenge for the first time the divine legitimacy of political power, establishing the basis of a new vision of the political community. Collegiants understood religious community as deprived from any form of divine inspiration and conceived it as a human association, nevertheless they never outline a political parallelism to this situation. The most evident reason of this absence is probably the lack of a strong monarchy in the 17th century United Provinces. However the relationship between secular and religious ideology did not fail and was well summarized by the situation after the Synod of Dordrecht, which created a rupture in Dutch society with the consequent convergence of the religious position with the political one. The intervention of Grotius in favor of the Arminian party testified to a clear identification between theological opposition to predestination (which meant a challenge to Calvinist orthodoxy) and antimonarchical opinion. This fracture remained invisible in Collegiants sources that debated the secularization of Churches and consider religious congregations as human institutions, but never tried to define the legitimacy of political institutions. It is possible, however, to find in the history of the Collegiants one significant exception: Cornelius Plockhoy\''s attempt to promote a religious-social project in the Dutch colonies of Delaware . Plockhoy\''s work illuminates the relationship and the fruitful parallels that it is possible to make between the United Provinces and England, especially during the time of the Cromwellian Commonwealth. Plockhoy\''s most significant works were written, indeed, in England, some years before the fail of Cromwell, and testify to a particular social and political engagement in the construction and definition of a community with a religious basis. It is interesting to note that only after the English experience did Plockhoy returned to Holland, following the end of the Commonwealth, to propose a similar project to the city of Amsterdam. This chapter suggests an analysis of his English and Dutch sources, stressing the differences and the modifications to his proposal. The importance of this author lies in the possibility of deducing from his position a possible Collegiant\'' thinking on politics and social organization. This contribution is certainly not descriptive of Collegiantism as a whole but represents the only explicit trace of the modification of Rijnsburger\''s religious reflections on the secular field. The description of Plockhoy\''s community in many respects echoes a certain irenicism sourced form the reading of Rosicrucian text; however it reflets and refers principally to his Collegiant experience . Although Plockhoy\''s account of the community project is never exclusively religious, the confessional element appears as prominently in both his Dutch and English projects. His religious and political project emerge clearly from his letters to Cromwell: it is essentially devoted to resolving the problem of religious conflict and the disturbance of social peace. It is, indeed, clear that Plockhoy\''s aim was not that of describing an ideal society or forming a separate community in order to conserve a purist religious ideal, but to propose a paradigmatic alternative to the religious turmoil and the social injustices of his time. The relation between political and religious arguments in Plockhoy\''s solution to religious turmoil highlights the interconnection between religious tolerance and colonial criticism, social injustice and authoritarianism. Plockhoy\''s meticulous pedagogic description of his project, his underlining of the necessity of economic independence for women and the possibility of them participating in collective work are expressions of an outlook that includes an aware judgment of his contemporary society. The last part of this chapter is dedicated to criticizes two approaches dominant in the literature about Plockhoy: one is the description of his project as a classical form of Utopia the other one is the reading of the Delaware religious community interpreted as a triumph of the work ethic. The third chapter of this dissertation deals with the tolerance, a fundamental and central concept to understand the nature of the Collegiants. It is our intention to show how during the 17th century there emerged in the Netherlands, in the religious context, a new concept of tolerance inspired by Castellio\''s works. The publication and translation, in the first half of the 17th century, of some of Castellio\''s work testify to the major interest that the French author had in the United Provinces, especially for the oppositors to the intolerant and orthodox Calvinist tradition. For the Collegiants, Castellio represented a predecessor in the struggle for religious peace. His work against the persecution of the heretics, supported by Biblical argumentation, represented a constant source of inspiration for the partisan of religious toleration. As suggested by Voogt , Castellio\''s deconstruction of the concept of heresy, as it was used by the Calvinist orthodoxy, in order to redefined it to signify a person who acts and believes differently from the mainstream, represented Collegiants\'' basis to rethink the concepts of rationality and truth. The peculiarity of the Dutch concept of vedraagzaamheid (tolerance), in opposition to how tolerance was defined and discussed in the European mainstream debate, was certainly due to the elements of reciprocity and mutuality that this particular form of tolerance included. In the 17th century, tolerance (especially religious tolerance) was used to label negative behavior, to identify indifferentism or libertinism, intolerance was, on the contrary, a sign of unity, integrity, and orthodoxy. Furthermore, arguments for religious intolerance were justified by the biblical example of the Mosaic theocracy, while religious tolerance represented the interests of the emerging mercantile elite, which supported the Republican experiment and advocated cities\'' autonomy. Tolerance became, in the 17th century, a concept contested because of its pejorative meaning; the progressive introduction of the pro-tolerance position, in order to contrast with this negative predominant vision, supported the idea that tolerance was not a menace to the integrity and peace of the Dutch Republic but the principal reason for its prosperity. The concept of tolerance became, afterwards, the battle-field on which the best juridical, economical and political form of the United Provinces was decided. The penetration of this debate about tolerance and intolerance in the Collegiants movement was adapted into an anticonfessional and irenic orientation focusing on religious and social peace. The defense of an unlimited and mutual tolerance represented, for the Collegiants, a proposal of pacification in the pluralistic dimension of the Dutch religious life, which was perceived, by their coeval, as a source of division and instability. The practice of nonexclusive tolerance and the extensive reception of different confessions inside the movement was a pragmatic attempt to find a solution to the problematic turbulence inside the Doopsgezinden and more generally to the religious disputations in the United Provinces. The central figure investigating the conduct and the limits of this debate inside the Collegiants was Jan Bredenburg. This chapter will, indeed, analyze the trouble arising from Bredenburg\''s position on tolerance and his extensive use of Spinozist concepts and language. This debate about the extension and the limits of tolerance involved, indirectly and directly, a discussion regarding religious organization, freedom of speech, and charismatic authority. In his works, Bredenburg, with his continuous redefinition of the discussion about tolerance, shows all the ambiguity and ambivalence of this term. Unlimited and mutual tolerance finds its limits in the continuous exigence of a normative delimitation of it, in the distinction of necessary and unnecessary dogma, but also, in a trivial way, in the impossibility of tolerating the intolerant. In the case of the Collegiants the adversaries of the unlimited and mutual tolerance undermined Collegiants\'' nonexclusivism with their proposals to identify with a confession of faith. Pressures in the direction of identification and exclusivism were, however, only a part of the tolerance problem. With the "Bredenburgse Twisten" (Bredenburg controversy) the limits and the ambiguities of the concept of tolerance and the limits of the penetration of Spinoza\''s philosophy in Collegiant\'' movement become clear. These limits concerned especially the necessity and priority of contrasting skeptical and atheist tendencies in the field of belief. The final chapter of this dissertation is dedicated to a question that underlines the problems of anticonfessionalism, tolerance, and secularization. The question asked in this conclusive part regards the possibility to trace the emergence of rational argument in Collegiants understanding of the divinity. To answer this question it was necessary to make some preliminary remarks about the diffusion and vernacularization of Descartes\'' and Spinoza\''s philosophies in the 17th century Netherlands. Short descriptions of the two most influential systems of thought of the epoch are two methodological steps useful in understanding not only the degree of penetration of these philosophies into Collegiants but also the nature and meaning of the concept of rationality at that time. The definition of the relationship with the divinity, after the XIX Arikelen\''s statement of the unholy Church, is represented, in the history of the Collegiant movement, by a precise moment: the discussion and dispute between the Rijnsburgers and the Quaker missionaries in the United Provinces. The debate with the Quakers assumes a specific meaning not only because it shows the proximity and similarity between the two religious movements but also because it testifies to the emergence of a central concept: the light. Central text to determine the nature of this relationship and to define the meaning that for the Collegiants had the concept of light, is Balling´s Het licht op den Kandelaar (The Light on the Candlestick). Balling\''s answer to Quakers represents a penetration of Spinozist language into the definition of religion as knowledge of God but also a singular affinity and fascination for the Quakers\'' concept of light. The question of contact with the divinity appears in the text as an individual experience, not mediated by any human instrument via language or the empirical experience. The approach to God is certainly described as an epistemological progression but the perfect comprehension of God is defined with the vocabulary of the affections rather than as full rational understanding. This text is certainly highly controversial and the continuous shift between philosophical and Quakers\'' language make its interpretation problematic. Het licht op den Kandelaar reflects Collegiants\'' position as a sum of philosophical argumentation, mysticism, and the irreconcilable reference to God as an infinite and unknowable creature. What emerges with force in the analysis of this source is the impossibility of understanding Balling\''s description of the relationship with God as purely rational. Balling, however, stresses the possibility of the constant perfectionism of human knowledge and self-emancipation and, furthermore, proposes new terms for religious thought. What he calls the "true religion" is described as ethical behavior constructed with the combination of tolerance, equal participation in the religious life, and the refusal to countenance formal conformism to Church institutions. Collegiants\'' acceptance of a Church without God does not necessary involve a pure absence of divine work, on the contrary, the proximity to God is progressively researched in an interior sphere which involve a process of knowledge. The legitimacy of the "Truth" is, then, given no more by the transcendental gift of the divinity but in the accordance of personal conviction and ethical behavior, the religion is, indeed, redefined according to these terms. True religion is, for Balling, a continuous inquiry into the natural and internal principle that each individual possesses in order to achieve full comprehension of God\''s word. This statement testify not only of a new conception of the Religion but also reaffirm the minoritaire core of Collegiants´nature; religion, in their understanding, is not more matter of concord, unity, orthodoxy but source of knowledge, problematization and continuous questioning about its own identity. Nonconformity and cultural dynamics: some preliminary remarks Before starting the presentation of the Collegiants\'' argument about tolerance, Church organization, and rationalism, to fully understand some choices and the approach of this dissertation, and to comprehend how Collegiants sources have been read, some methodological remarks are necessaries about the emergence and development of the historical phenomenon called nonconformity and how was it received and transformed in 17th century Holland. Nonconformity is, as will be shown, one of the central concepts developed by the Collegiants to justify their antiauthoritarianism and anticonfessionalism. The concept appears more interesting if we look at the number of meanings and social phenomena that it includes. It first developed in England in the juridical context and was named in the later 17th century as a defined religious movement that opposed the Act of Uniformity. In the English sources it is possible to retrace the history of this concept, demonstrating how the significance and arguments regarding nonconformity changed in one hundred years. Not far from England, in the United Provinces, the evolution of the concept of nonconformity follows another route, giving rise to radically different signification. Proposing a comparative study, between England and the United Provinces, of the development and semantic elaboration of the concept of nonconformity, is useful not only to understand the different expression of religious dissidence but also to detect cultural and social change in the approach to religion. Beyond the obvious differences between the two Countries, the different political, social and cultural history it is still possible and fruitful to compare how the concept of nonconformity developed in England and Netherlands because of the numerous contact between the Collegiants and the English religious dissident groups and because of the particular redefinition that the concept of nonconformity assumed in the United Provinces. The differentiation of English nonconformity (which dominates the European semantic field with direct and specific connotations of particular events with particular actors) from Dutch nonconformity, explains how historical agents using or interpreting a concept in a particular way can change its semantic connotation. The category of nonconformity, because of its shift from a juridical field to a social-religious one, indicates a semantic enrichment and a conceptual dynamic that can prove a sensible point to investigate structural changes. These case studies possess the necessary characteristics to be approached with the methodology developed by Koselleck and the Cambridge History of Ideas, because "society and language insofar belong among the meta-historical givens without which no narrative and no history are thinkable. For this reason, social historical and conceptual historical theories, hypotheses and methods are related to all merely possible regions of the science of history" . It is our intention to pay particular attention to the analysis of the sources and to their contextualization with the aim of constructing a map of nonconformity\''s semantic change via its arguments in pamphlets and polemical texts of the 17th century. It is our intention to investigate, through the study of the emergence of this concept, the tendencies of secularization, the development of arguments regarding religious indifferentism, and the renounciation of a religious life normalized by concrete institutions, rituals, and ceremonies. A semantic study of how the concept of nonconformity emerges, how it is filled with new meaning, and which new and old concepts intervene to define the religious and political field, is essential to explain and understand the Collegiants\'' mentality in 17th century Holland, to determine how they think, and in which ways they influence the cultural and social dynamic in a specific context. The production of new meaning and the continuous nomination of a cognitive world influence, in their turn, the production and development of new instruments of thinking. To understand the shift, the dynamics, and the changes in the cultural field, a rhetorical and semantic analysis is necessary. The arena of investigation is, however, limited to the religious sphere and the sources analyzed are, in a large majority, polemical pamphlets, which means that the question about the correlation between the emergence of a new concept and change in the mentality refers principally to the change in the perception of religion as a dogmatic and doctrinaire system. The concept of nonconformity is surrounded by many other concepts, which partly explain its nature and constitute its semantic field. In this dissertation we focus on different concepts (tolerance, anticonfessionalism, Utopia, mysticism, and millenarianism) because nonconformity emerges, from the analysis of different pamphlets and sources, as correlated with them. Dutch nonconformity involves, for example, a necessary reflection on Church form, the organization of religious life, exclusivism vs. non-exclusivism and a certain vision of the future that actualizes itself as Utopia or millenarian impulse. This constellation of concepts, which characterizes itself for semantic differentiation but also for their strict interrelation, is also useful in explaining the nature of a radical and dissident movement like the Collegiants and in understanding how the religion, understood as belief experience, was fulfilled by new themes, concepts, and meanings. Furthermore, to investigate this conceptual connection and contextualize the emergence and use of determined religious vocabulary, it is useful to understand the nature and presence, in the Dutch religious field, of the phenomenon of secularization especially in its particularly form which goes under the name of "rationalization of the world". The central question asked in this dissertation is, finally, not how it is possible to construct a category of nonconformity as an analytical concept that helps in understanding religious phenomena, but what is nonconformity and which kind of religious phenomenon it describes, how it has been used and with which consequences. The question regards how it is possible to detect structural change in the mentality while investigating conceptual change or emergence of a new concept. The cultural dynamic is, in this dissertation, understood as a semantic and cognitive phenomenon of mutual influence between emergence or nomination of new concepts and events historically determined. The History of Concepts approach privileges, as has been shown, the semantic field and text analysis for detecting changes in the mentality and in the social-cultural sphere. One more reason to find in this approach a fruitful method for understanding the Collegiants\'' universe is the particular interest that they reserved for the language. The Collegiants stressed the importance of the spread of vernacular Dutch with the compilation of grammars, dictionaries, and lexica . In 1654 the Collegiant Luidewijk Meijer published the Nederlandsche Woorden-Schat, with a new edition in 1658. The Woorden-Schat was a Latin-Dutch and French-Dutch dictionary and a guide to principal terms in Nederduitsche (Low Dutch), with particular attention paid to the basterdtwoorden (Bastard Words) and the konstwoorden beghrijpt (cultural and artistic concepts). Some Collegiants in Rotterdam, as well as in Amsterdam, were active participants in a cultural project that worked on the definition and elaboration of the Dutch language in poesy, theater, and literature. Rafael Camphuysen and Johachim Oudaan were appreciated poets and, in 1669, Luidewijk Meijer and Johannes Bouwmeester founded a cultural academy with the name Nil Volentibus Arduum (Nothing is arduous for the willing). Around the same time Adriaan Koerbagh published Een Bloemhof (A flower garden), a theological dictionary edited according to controversial philological criteria, with the explicit aim of explaining the origin of superstition and unmasking the authority of theologians\'' obscure and adulterated language . In 1706 William Sewel, a Flemish converted to Quakerism, wrote the Compendius Guide to the Low-Dutch Language, a Dutch grammar for English speakers. These sources and the presence in Collegiants\'' texts of a continuous debate about the language, testify to great awareness in their choice of terms and words. Collegiants often use italics to emphasize special concepts, or to introduce a neologism or Latin calque. In addition, they refer several times to their efforts to introduce a correct and transparent use of the language. The Collegiants were surprisingly familiar with the crystallizing power in a certain employment of discourse and language; they explicitly challenged the predominance of scholastic and theologian's terms, which substitute the direct and immediate experience of the religion with an intricate and abstract speculation on transcendence and divinity. Dutch grammar and dictionaries, work with the vernacular language in poetic or literary texts, and philological research on the origin of words, testify to a Collegiant Dutch language undertaking, an engagé project anything but neutral to democratize the discussion about religious matters and to guarantee egalitarian participation by both cultivated and uncultivated people. This effort is well represented by an emblematic figure in the Collegiants\'' sources; the founder of this religious movement, Van de Kodde, is several times described as a cultivated peasant able to speak French, Latin, Greek, in the same way the Philosopherenden Boer (Philosophizing peasant), described by Stol in 1676, extols the superiority of a simple peasant\'' reasonable pragmatism in comparison to the Cartesian\''s method and the Quaker\''s rhetoric. This was the essence of the Collegiants\'' anticonfessionalism and antiauthoritarianism, a campain with both Utopian and rational implications, aiming at a possible rethinking of religious experience outside normative structures.